Repeat after me... Z-vez-da. Remember that word, because you'll be hearing it a lot over the next few months, and probably years. Zvezda is a space module that weighs about 42,000 pounds. It was launched aboard a Russian Proton K rocket to low earth orbit (LEO) on July 12, 2000. About a year later, it became the cornerstone of the International Space Station (ISS)...

Cemeteries are sad; sadder still is a large field of unmarked graves. After this year's Berlin Air Show (ILA), my Teal colleagues Bill Storey, Joel Johnson, Phil Finnegan and I all trundled off on a road trip to see battlefields in Eastern Germany and Poland. Thanks to Bill's borderline obsessive attention to topographical detail, we walked on pretty fields where, in 1945, tens of thousands of bodies fell along the Kustrin Highway, the Third Reich's last stand.

The CAMM effort is further evidence of the collapse of multi-national European missile efforts under MBDA. In theory, the British FLAADS requirement could be satisfied by MICA-VL which is basically in the same niche as FLAADS. Instead, the British side of MBDA is engaging in an entirely separate effort from the French or Germans to satisfy domestic needs and to create an attractive export product to re-place the past generation of Rapier/Seawolf.

The National Aeronautic Association Collier Trophy Committee is a great place to see present-day glimpses of our industry's future, and this year I was privileged to serve on it for a third time. There were two finalists, Northrop Grumman's X-47B (the winner) and Pratt & Whitney's PurePower Geared Turbofan (GTF) engine, which superbly illustrated two radically different aspects of our future.