  The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a joint
U.S./German project, is a 2.5-meter infrared airborne telescope carried by a
Boeing 747-SP that flies in the stratosphere at altitudes as high as 45,000
feet (13.72 km). This facility is capable of observing from 0.3 {\mu}m to 1.6
mm with an average transmission greater than 80 percent. SOFIA will be staged
out of the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center aircraft operations facility at
Palmdale, CA. The SOFIA Science Mission Operations (SMO) will be located at
NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA. First science flights began in
2010 and a full operations schedule of up to one hundred 8 to 10 hour flights
per year will be reached by 2014. The observatory is expected to operate until
the mid 2030's. SOFIAs initial complement of seven focal plane instruments
includes broadband imagers, moderate-resolution spectrographs that will resolve
broad features due to dust and large molecules, and high-resolution
spectrometers capable of studying the kinematics of atomic and molecular gas at
sub-km/s resolution. We describe the SOFIA facility and outline the
opportunities for observations by the general scientific community and for
future instrumentation development. The operational characteristics of the
SOFIA first-generation instruments are summarized. The status of the flight
test program is discussed and we show First Light images obtained at
wavelengths from 5.4 to 37 \"im with the FORCAST imaging camera. Additional
information about SOFIA is available at http://www.sofia.usra.edu and
http://www.sofia.usra.edu/Science/docs/SofiaScienceVision051809-1.pdf
