Aerospace Industry

Aerospace Industry, the industry concerned with the design and construction of aircraft and spacecraft and the equipment on which they rely. Although the term was not used until the late 1950s, when the first space flights were made, the industry's origins are much older, dating from the early 20th century, when the first aeroplanes flew. Modern aerospace is a high-technology industry. Its products include not only space shuttles, satellites, rocket engines, helicopters, private propeller-driven and jet-powered aeroplanes, military aircraft (and the weapons they carry), and commercial airliners, but also electronic guidance, navigation, and safety systems, the turbofan jet engines that power large aircraft, and the special tools that technicians need to service all these vehicles and systems.

Aerospace companies are important components not only of the world's more powerful economies, such as those of the United States, Canada, Japan, and the major Western European nations, but also of those of some smaller countries, such as Brazil and Israel. The United States is the leading aerospace nation. The value of manufactured aerospace product sold internally and worldwide by the United States in 1998 was estimated at US$65 billion; the industry generates the largest trade surplus of any manufacturing industry in the country, which in 1998 reached around US$41 billion.

The technologies and industries of flight have always been international in scope. Most leading nations have had an aircraft industry that has been responsible for particular technical advances, which have quickly spread to other countries. But the primary force behind the growth of the aerospace industry has been war. For example, before World War II, the aircraft industries in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the United States, Great Britain, and Germany remained quite small, but then grew at fantastic rates during the war. Enormous technological breakthroughs were made. Rocket engines and guided missiles were developed in Germany, and jet engines were developed both there and in Britain. The Soviets and Americans made the most of these inventions during the cold war and the consequent international arms race. In 1947, American jet aircraft achieved supersonic speed, and in the 1950s jet engines were used to power large airliners.

The USSR made the first space flight in 1957, and the United States and the USSR then began a race to the Moon that the United States won with the first manned Moon landing in 1969. The two superpowers continued throughout the 1970s and the 1980s to outdo one another in space and near-space technology. Thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles were built, many satellites were sent into space to provide military intelligence, better communications, and weather information, and unmanned space probes surveyed every planet.

Although the end of the cold war in the early 1990s promised to reduce military demand for aerospace products, aerospace remains one of the most important and dynamic of the world's industries.

See also Jet Propulsion; Space Exploration; Warfare.