It looked ordinary enough: shaped like an aircraft, with a snub-nosed fuselage, short straight wings, and a horizontal tailplane with two vertical fins. As the assembled engineers looked on, Faget threw it twice across the room: first, it flew arrow-straight, just like a conventional aircraft; before he launched it a second time, he tilted the nose of the model up toward the ceiling at an angle of sixty degrees. Yet now his creation maintained this attitude throughout its flight path, presenting its entire underside to the path of onrushing air, as if falling, horizontally, through space. The
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