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  • Grey Berets Forecasting Weather Behind Enemy Lines

    From applying the fundamentals of atmospheric dynamics to parachuting behind enemy lines, “weather warriors” are some of the most versatile Airmen in the US Air Force.Depending on Air Force needs, Airmen are either assigned to an Airborne Combat Weather Team (CWT (A)) or a Special Operations Weather

  • Global Peacetime Transition

    Following the Korean and First Indochina Wars, the Air Rescue Service (ARS) switched from a wartime posture to a global search and rescue (SAR) service.Maintaining their primary objective of saving lives and Air Crew Recovery (ACR), the first National SAR Plan of March 1956 added the responsibility

  • Global Positioning System and its Impact!

    Did you know GPS began as a military navigation tool in the early 1960s? Later the U.S. Air Force became the lead organization for developing this system. GPS benefits the world in many ways from cell phones to military weapons to work in ways that have changed our world since the 1970s.The

  • Gemini G4C Space Suit—1966

    Gemini missions lasted up to 14 days and featured the first American spacewalks, where crewmen ventured outside their spacecraft. The Gemini program (1965–66) included 12 flights with two crewmen each, and eight Gemini astronauts were US Air Force officers.The G4C suit was the most common of three

  • Gunners

    US Army Air Forces gunners defended B-17 Flying Fortress and B-24 Liberator bombers against fighter attacks with machine guns aimed by hand (“flexible guns”) and electrically-powered gun turrets.  Typically, gunners made up half of a bomber crew, manning a top turret, ball turret, two waist guns,

  • German Ace and American Citizen Lt. Arthur Rahn

    Arthur Rahn was born in East Prussia in 1897. In January 1915, six months after World War I began, the seventeen-year-old Rahn volunteered to join the Imperial German Air Service. He began flying school in the spring of 1915 in the town of Koslin, near the Baltic Sea. During his combat flying career

  • Gemini Spacecraft

    Manned Orbiting Laboratory SpacecraftThis spacecraft was built for the U.S. Air Force’s Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) program, a top-secret effort to take extremely detailed reconnaissance photographs of Cold War adversaries’ territory from space. The MOL program planned to use astronauts to

  • GAMBIT 3 KH-8 Reconnaissance Satellite

    Please Note: This artifact is currently in storage and off public display.The GAMBIT 3 KH-8 photo reconnaissance satellite improved on the GAMBIT 1 KH-7 by providing much better image resolution. GAMBIT 3’s stereoscopic cameras focused on details in small target areas, while other satellites

  • GAMBIT 1 KH-7 Film Recovery Vehicle

    GAMBIT reconnaissance satellites returned exposed film to earth in re-entry vehicles or “buckets” that separated from the satellite, fell through the atmosphere, and descended by parachute. US Air Force aircraft plucked the buckets from the sky at around 15,000 feet. This GAMBIT 1 return capsule’s

  • GAMBIT 1 KH-7 Reconnaissance Satellite

    Please Note: This artifact is currently in storage and off public display.The GAMBIT 1 KH-7 satellite was the first American space reconnaissance system to consistently return high-resolution photographs. GAMBIT 1 vehicles flew from 1963-1967 and were the first satellites to feature stereo cameras.