On May 5, 1961, astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American to fly in space. Although National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had discounted the need for him to urinate, Shepard did, in his spacesuit, short circuiting his electronic biosensors. With the development of the pressure suit needed for high-altitude and space flight during the 1950s, technicians had developed the means for urine collection. However, cultural mores, combined with a lack of interagency communication, and the technical difficulties of spaceflight made human waste collection a difficult task. Despite the difficulties, technicians at NASA created a successful urine collection device that John Glenn wore on the first Mercury orbital flight on February 20, 1962. With minor modifications, male astronauts used this system to collect urine until the Space Shuttle program. John Glenn's urine collection device is at the National Air and Space Museum and has been on view to the public since 1976.

While spectator interest got aircraft off the ground, scientific inquiry initially fueled advances in design. But from a very early date, military application was a driving force. The histories of aircraft, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) bring to light the relative roles of science and military in the development of aerospace in Southern California.

On 23 January 1968, the North Korean Navy attacked and captured the USS Pueblo, a United States naval intelligence collection ship in international waters off the coast of North Korea. The USS Pueblo was one of a group of AGER ships created to provide intelligence from the Sea of Japan during the Cold War. This article discusses the growing hostilities of North Korea during the Cold War and uses recently declassified documents to illustrate the naval intelligence efforts of the United States to monitor the North Korean threat.