US Air Force in the context of "United States Army Signal Corps"

Project Mercury was the first human spaceflight program of the United States, running from 1958 through 1963. An early highlight of the Space Race, its goal was to put a man into Earth orbit and return him safely, ideally before the Soviet Union. Taken over from the US Air Force by the newly created civilian space agency NASA, it conducted 20 uncrewed developmental flights (some using animals), and six successful flights by astronauts. The program, which took its name from Roman mythology, cost $2.76 billion (adjusted for inflation). The astronauts were collectively known as the "Mercury Seven", and each spacecraft was given a name ending with a "7" by its pilot.

The Space Race began with the 1957 launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1. This came as a shock to the American public, and led to the creation of NASA to expedite existing US space exploration efforts, and place most of them under civilian control. After the successful launch of the Explorer 1 satellite in 1958, crewed spaceflight became the next goal. The Soviet Union put the first human, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, into a single orbit aboard Vostok 1 on April 12, 1961. Shortly after this, on May 5, the US launched its first astronaut, Alan Shepard, on a suborbital flight. Soviet Gherman Titov followed with a day-long orbital flight in August 1961. The US reached its orbital goal on February 20, 1962, when John Glenn made three orbits around the Earth. When Mercury ended in May 1963, both nations had sent six people into space, but the Soviets led the US in total time spent in space.

A launch control center (LCC), in the United States, is the main control facility for intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). A launch control center monitors and controls missile launch facilities. From a launch control center, the missile combat crew can monitor the complex, launch the missile, or relax in the living quarters (depending on the ICBM system). The LCC is designed to provide maximum protection for the missile combat crew and equipment vital to missile launch. Missile silos are common across the midwestern United States, and over 450 missiles remain in US Air Force (USAF) service.

Due to modern conventional weapons, missile launch control centers are becoming rarer in the US, and it is expected that the number of missiles will stay at 450 Minuteman III.

A lifting body is a fixed-wing aircraft or spacecraft configuration in which the body itself produces lift. In contrast to a flying wing, which is a wing with minimal or no conventional fuselage, a lifting body can be thought of as a fuselage with little or no conventional wing. Whereas a flying wing seeks to maximize cruise efficiency at subsonic speeds by eliminating non-lifting surfaces, lifting bodies generally minimize the drag and structure of a wing for subsonic, supersonic and hypersonic flight, or spacecraft re-entry. All of these flight regimes pose challenges for proper flight safety.

Lifting bodies were a major area of research in the 1960s and 1970s as a means to build a small and lightweight crewed spacecraft. The US built a number of lifting body rocket planes to test the concept, as well as several rocket-launched re-entry vehicles that were tested over the Pacific. Interest waned as the US Air Force lost interest in the crewed mission, and major development ended during the Space Shuttle design process when it became clear that the highly shaped fuselages made it difficult to fit fuel tankage.

Diffused lighting camouflage was a form of active camouflage using counter-illumination to enable a ship to match its background, the night sky, that was tested by the Royal Canadian Navy on corvettes during World War II. The principle was discovered by a Canadian professor, Edmund Godfrey Burr, in 1940. It attracted interest because it could help to hide ships from submarines in the Battle of the Atlantic, and the research project began early in 1941. The Royal Navy and the US Navy carried out further equipment development and trials between 1941 and 1943.

The concept behind diffused lighting camouflage was to project light on to the sides of a ship, to make its brightness match its background. Projectors were mounted on temporary supports attached to the hull and the prototype was developed to include automatic control of brightness using a photocell. The concept was never put into production, though the Canadian prototypes did briefly see service. The Canadian ideas were adapted by the US Air Force in its Yehudi lights project.