The Wright Stuff

[Ray Tackett]

The Wright Brothers sold pieces of the fabric covering of the airplane which made the first powered flight in order to raise money for further development. One of those pieces will be aboard the first powered flight on another planet.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021...ights-on-mars/

[Scott Dyer HPN/NY]

It's very cool that the fabric is on Ingenuity (April 8 earth predicted for the first flight).

Perhaps it is a piece of fabric that the Wrights sold off as a fundraiser. I watched an Air and Space lecture last night with a JPL scientist and one of the A&S planetary geologists who said it came from the museum (I assumed it was a snip taken during a restoration). I wish the arstechnica article said more about the provenance.

[Terry Carraway]

Cool.

I have 1 square inch of the original fabric from the prototype DH Mosquito. I bought it at the DH museum, where they were doing a restoration on the prototype

[Ray Tackett]

https://xkcd.com/2452/