Celebrating 100 years of flight: a wealth of previously unexhibited aeronautic articrafts is traveling around the country to commemorate the century of technological advances that have unfolded since Orville and Wilbur Wright changed the world of transportation forever.

• Position: Science & Technology - Aerospace Design: The Art of Engineering from NASA's Aeronautical Research

"AEROSPACE DESIGN: The Art of Engineering from NASA's Aeronautical Research" presents a new look at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's wealth of previously unexhibited and unpublished artifacts that not only technological advances in flight over the past century, but present aesthetically striking objects, illustrating how aviation-related forms can be as beautiful as they are functional. It also serves as a pictorial survey documenting aeronautical history and the architects and builders, engineers, and scientists behind these developments.

The exhibition has been created to commemorate the centennial of powered, controlled aviation marked by the landmark flight of the Wright Brothers on Dec. 17, 1903. It features the architecture and engineering of wind tunnels through more than 65 artifacts from the 1930s through the present. These include archetypes that feature designs for conceptual airplanes, past, present, and future.

The primary tool used for aerodynamic engineering is the wind tunnel, although it is just one of the three elements employed for research, the others being computer simulation and flight--testing. A model, meanwhile, is a highly detailed, reduced--scale version of an actual aircraft or spacecraft, and often contains sensors that enable it to predict, from its exposure in a controlled environment, how a real vehicle would fly. Wind tunnels typically are classified by their speed, range, size, and testing capability. For speed alone, there are four categories: subsonic, up to 300 miles per hour; transonic, up to 600 mph; supersonic, for velocities between 600 and 1,000 mph; and hypersonic, beyond 1,000 mph. The size of a wind tunnel always is given in reference to the cross-sectional dimension where the models are put to the test. Finally, there are tunnels with unique testing capabilities that focus on the nuances of aerodynamics, such as spin tunnels that help us understand the spinning characteristics of vehicles in flight. It would not be an overstatement to suggest that all transports manufactured in the world today that pass through the air--whether cars, trucks, trains, planes, rockets, or space ships--have been tested in wind tunnels to ensure that they will perform safely and efficiently.

Ever since Englishman Francis H. Wenham built the world's first wind tunnel in 1871, aeronautical engineers, inventors, and scientists have placed models within them to understand, test, and perfect their...