Originally equipped with the AIM-9B Sidewinder for close-range missile attack in Vietnam, the USAF replaced the mediocre AIM-9B with the Hughes AIM-4D Falcon that was used by the USAF's interceptor force. Though heat seeking like the Sidewinder, the Falcon proved wholly unsuitable for dogfighting as it was designed to shoot down strategic bombers. It required the seeker head be cooled down before launch and needed a direct hit to score a kill as it didn't have proximity fuzing. In what became known as the "Falcon Fiasco", the limited cooling time of the liquid nitrogen supply was only two minutes, usually less, and the seeker could not be pre-cooled. Once the nitrogen supply was exhausted, the missile was blind and referred to derisively as the "Hughes Arrow".

After he fired four Falcons in combat without success, Col. Robin Olds, commander of the 555th Tactical Fighter Wing in Vietnam ordered them off the USAF Phantoms in theater as he was convinced the Falcons cost him a fifth kill to reach ace status in Vietnam. Newer versions of the Sidewinder returned to the Phantom's arsenal as a result.

Source: Air & Space Smithsonian, January 2009. "Where Have All the Phantoms Gone? How a fighter-bomber-recon-attack superstar ended up as fodder for target practice" by Ralph Wetterhahn, p31.

As often as eight times in a year, a French Navy (Marine Nationale Aeronavale) Dassault Falcon 50M SURMAR (SURveillance MARitime) of the unit Flottille 24F deploys to Cayenne in French Guyana via Dakar, Senegal from its home base at Lann-Bihoue in France. While there, the Falcon 50M conducts patrols of the French exclusive economic zone offshore before Ariane rocket launches from the Kourou Space Centre to be sure the areas were the rocket's boosters fall back to earth are clear of shipping.

Source: Air International, August 2009. "SAR Dream Machine" by Henri-Pierre Grolleau, p50.

In the early 1960s Dassault was seeking a US partner to license build the Falcon 20 business jet for the US market. Grumman, Lockheed, North American, and McDonnell were out as they had their own business jet designs in development (Gulfstream, Jetstar, Sabreliner, and McDonnell 119/220, respectively). Douglas was already working with Piaggio on the PD-808 "Vespa Jet", Beechcraft had formed an alliance with Hawker Siddeley on the HS.125, and Convair was mired in problems with their CV-880/990 jetliners.

That left Boeing. Dassault approached Boeing and the the board of directors after careful examination of Dassault's proposal elected to not invest in the bizjet market, preferring to continue to keep its capital in its growing commercial airframe business.

Source: Flightpath, Volume 2/Winter 2003. "Dassault Falcon: Mystere Magic" by David Donald (Variant File), p84.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is the first American rocket since the Saturn V that is designed to be able to lose an engine without compromising the mission. Using a cluster of nine engines in the first stage, the Falcon 9 has been designed from the start by SpaceX (founded and headed by Elon Musk, founder of PayPal) to be man-rated and is a top contender in NASA's COTS (Commercial Orbital Transportation Services) program.

Source: Air and Space Smithsonian, May 2009. "Is it Safe? Building Rockets as if Lives Depended on It" by Michael Milstein, p21.