The purpose of this book is to share collective experience on human spaceflight operations. For the many authors, this is nothing less than a work of passion. They are sharing their life's work with the goal of passing on their experience to the next generation of space engineers, designers, operators, and crew.

Nowadays solitude is everywhere. Increasingly similar to monads, we are losing the ability to build solid connections between us, and to convert our private experience into public matter. What is becoming lost is an «art of translation», the capacity to build bridges between private problems and troubles and common causes, something that may connect people and make them act in accord: that is, politics as an art to «bring us together».The goal of this book is to question, in many different ways, the link between solitude and politics. It is the result of a collective work of young researchers, trying to understand, and to fight, their own solitude and loneliness within the academia. It offers a preliminary interdisciplinary discussion aiming to forge the tools to grasp this strange oxymoron, to better comprehend this simultaneously individual and collective condition.

This volume is the proceedings of the Atmospheric Flight Mechanics Conference, which took place in New Orleans, August 1997. It focuses on the technical progress, issues and challenges associated with atmospheric flight. Technical papers address stability and control, flying qualities (including one session dedicated to pilot-induced oscillations), unsteady and vortex aerodynamics, system and parameter identification, aircraft flight dynamic re-entry and aero assist technologies, and reusable launch vehicles.