Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

I visited the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport in Virginia.

The main Air and Space museum is on the Washington Mall. I have been there many times. But this was different, amazing, and the three hours I had available were nowhere near enough.

There are literally hundreds of aircraft there, and after being there, I understand why this had to be built at an airport. How else would you get an aircraft the size of a Concorde into a building? You obviously have to fly it there.

I am sure there is much that I missed, but here are the highlights I remember, in no particular order:

• The Enola Gay is the very aircraft that dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan in August 1945. It sits there, close enough that you can look into the cockpit and see the seats and the controls.
• The space shuttle Enterprise was the initial flying prototype. It never flew in space, but rather it was built for flight tests in the atmosphere. As a result, it’s a full scale model of the shuttle, with the only difference being that the heat tiles and the main engines are simulated. I will never get close enough to a space shuttle to see its size and scale. Here I as able to stand under it and look up at its immensity. It is larger than I had envisioned.
• The quarantine module that the Apollo 11 astronauts were in after their return from the moon. I have seen pictures and television clips of Nixon speaking to the astronauts through the front window. Today I stood where Nixon stood, looking into the window. I could picture Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins inside, some 40 years ago.
• One of the Air France Concorde planes, after they retired the fleet, was given to the Smithsonian in 2003. The plane is there. You can stand directly under it. I was fascinated by the size of it. The engine intakes look surprisingly beat up and appear boxy and not aerodynamic.
• During the last flight of the SR-71, the fastest airplane in the world, from Los Angeles to Dulles in 1990, the pilots set a speed record of 1 hour and 4 minutes. After landing at Dulles, they handed it over to the Smithsonian. This is also a surprisingly large aircraft when you get up close to it. It is rumored that when it travels at Mach 3 or so, its surface gets so hot, you can fry an egg on it. I have seen SR-71 planes at Balboa Park in San Diego as well as at the airport in Richmond, Virginia. There seem to be a lot of them parked around the country.
• The Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer set a record of flying around the world.
• The European Spacelab module that was brought back by the shuttle.
• A replica of the Wright Brothers flyer.
• A Japanese Kamikaze plane. Surprisingly small, with no wheels and little controls. The things look just like bombs with a cockpit, which is what they really are. There are no wheels, since they are not intended to land. Some 5,000 Japanese pilots climbed into those cockpits knowing that they would die. I am amazed that actually happened. What a waste of human life. What a waste war is.

And tons more, experimental planes, rotorcraft, German and Japanese war planes, flying wings, bombers, fighters, gliders, satellites, missiles, engines, hang gliders, kites and balloon gondolas.

I need to go back to see the IMAX films, ride in the flight simulators, and spend more time on the exhibits. I only scratched the surface.

The museum is free, but surprisingly, there is a $15 charge to park, even though there is a huge amount of parking available. That was the only drawback, however. And after being there is still didn’t know who Steven F. Udvar-Hazy is, and I know I won’t remember his name.  Looking him up, I found he owns more aircraft than anyone in the United States, and he is number 305 on the Forbes 400 list. He donated $65 million to the Smithsonian, hence the name.

Reflections on the Moon Landings

A few weeks ago we celebrated the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. I was 13 then, and I was in front of the television. Since I was in Germany, it was in the middle of the night. I remember the awe and the fascination about what was happening.

40 years have now gone by. 70 percent of all people alive today were not alive when the first moon landing occurred. Of those that were alive, let’s say those that were younger than 8 probably didn’t care much and while they were there, they didn’t have the same experience  that I did. That’s another 10 percent.

So a full 80 percent of the world’s population did not have the experience of sitting in front of the television that day, watching those grainy pictures from very far away. To them, this is the distant past, sort of like the Nazi regime is to me, even though it only happened a dozen years before I was born.

And so goes the circle of life.

Apollo 11 in the Smithsonian

There are very few objects on earth that have traveled as far away as the moon, and come back to earth. Some of the boxes or cases that were used to store moon rocks count on that list. There were only twelve people that ever stood on the moon, and another six that orbited while the 12 were on the ground. Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 circled the moon, which makes another six people.

The Apollo 11 Capsule was the mother ship that brought back Armstrong, Aldin and Collins from the first moon landing in July 1969, 40 years ago now. This is arguably the most famous space ship in history, forever. Of all the gear and equipment that left on the Saturn V rocket during that launch, it’s the only thing that came back.

It is in prominent display, encapsulated in thick Plexiglas, in the Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.  I recently visited there and I stood in front of it in awe. I still remember sitting in front of my TV in 1969, a 13 year old boy, watching the events unfold, hearing commentators day and night talking about the space capsule, its “computers” and its high tech gear.

Looking into the capsule, the interior is definitely smaller than the front seat of  a compact car, with three seats in the front next to each other. The instruments look worn and like something out a Jules Verne book. There were no discernible computers then. Computers were still made of transistors and vacuum tubes. Integrated circuits didn’t exist yet. There are a lot of switches, dials and levers, all mechanical. The astronauts spent almost two weeks confined into this space, and of course the attached lander, during their journey to and from the moon. It was a lifeboat on an incredibly dangerous and long journey.

And here I was, standing in front of  it,  and had it not been  for the Plexiglas, I could have touched the dials. I was in awe.

Later I walked by and there was a group of teenage girls, standing in front of the capsule, leaning against it with their backs, blocking other visitors. They were talking on their cell phones to somebody about something, blatantly unaware of what they were leaning against. Even if they knew, they would  not appreciate it like I did right there, this strange artifact from decades before their births, that was part of a journey to the moon long ago.

Shuttle and Hubble Traverse Sun

I love these pictures. Today the Shuttle (blue arrow) and the Hubble Space Telecope (green arrow) traversed the sun, and astronomers from all over the world took pictures.

by NASA photographer Thierry Legault

See the full article in Universe Today here.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory – Open House

Today I went to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) open house in Pasadena. I have always been interested in the space program, intensely so, since I was a teenager, but I never really got involved. I drove to Cape Canaveral once, but didn’t have enough time to go in an take a proper tour, so I just saw the public museum part. I drove by the astronaut training center in Houston, but also didn’t have time for a tour. I never saw a rocket or shuttle launch or landing and never went to Palmdale.

I spent all day at JPL. There was more there to do and see than you can fit into a day. Unfortunately, there were thousands of people, and by afternoon, all venues had lines 30 minutes or longer to get in. The best time to be there was in the morning.

If you are a scientist, JPL is at the pinnacle of places to work. It was obvious that the people that worked there and showed off their projects and jobs were all proud of it. JPL basically drives the unmanned space program. All the robotic missions to low-earth orbit, to the moon and to all the solar system destinations had their origins there. The spacecraft get designed, built, assembled and tested there. Once en route, the mission control center tracks them, communicates with them, and receives their data.

For me, the most exciting part was seeing life-sized replica or models of  the various spacecraft I have followed throughout my life, starting with the Voyager 1 and 2 craft, launched in 1977, which are now the only two man-made objects to ever leave the solar system, going to the Cassini and Galileo, and of course including many types of rovers and landers, most notably those on Mars in recent years.

JPL is a place where a man my age can still dream. You see passion in the faces of the people that work there. I left overwhelmed by the fact that there is so much more to do and so much more to learn. There are lifetimes of work left just to scratch the surface.

And I am but a distant passer-by.

A Truly Bright Idea out of General Motors

Check out this article. A two-seater Segway that weighs 300 pounds  and can drive 35 miles an hour.

I have always wondered why we’re dragging massive amounts of steel, plastic, glass and rubber around with is just to go down to the local store,  the gym and to work.

Because our streets are too dangerous for a scooter.

But if those scooters were smart, communicated with each other like ants so they would not crash into each other, and had their own pathways, I’d ride one in a heartbeat.

This is a truly revolutionary concept that could make a real company out of GM in a few years.

What Does 100 Billion Dollars Buy?

When Ronald Reagan first proposed the International Space Station, it was supposed to cost $8 billion.

The total cost of the International Space Station, now nearly complete, is estimated to approach $100 billion.

We got decades of research, employment, frontier innovation and inspiration for generations of young people all over the world for that money.

Compare that to $185 billion Bush spent last fall, without much fanfare and questions, on AIG, and AIG is nowhere near assured survival.

Where did we get more bang for the buck?

When Will Space Station Be Overhead?

One of the neater things to experience when watching the sky is to find and track a satellite.  The International Space Station passes over your area every few weeks, and if you know where to look, and much more importantly, when to look, you get see it for about a minute at a time. By definition, this can only occur when the station (or any other satellite) is scheduled to pass right overhead, and the time of day is near dusk, since satellites cruise over 200 miles above earth. You must catch it when it passes at a time when the sun has set where you stand but it still shines 200 miles overhead. There is only a thin band of this condition that circles the earth.

Go to SpaceWeather.com to find out when that is and have a look.

Enter the Clones

A few days ago, President Obama has reversed Bush’s ban on federal funds for stem cell research. May science and progress continue for a few years, many a long few years, if the conservatives continue to implode and self destruct.

Humans will be cloned, whether George Bush and the far right likes that or not. Yet, our leadership during the last administration appeared to be stuck in the middle-ages, where the elite squashed science for fear of losing power and prestige. We had an American president and a German pope who together seemed to do their best to stall progress, science and intellectual freedom in the name of security, piousness and ethics. Whose security, piousness and ethics?

At the rate we were going, all serious medical science and research would have been done in Asia, further cementing the inexorable world leadership role of China in the twenty-first century. If we don’t reverse this trend soon we will have to go to Korea or China to buy the technology required to grow a new heart when our current one is diseased.

This gives the term shipping jobs offshore a whole new meaning. America is missing the point in so many areas, it is frightening.

Below the article I found in 2005 that prompted this thought. After reading it, scrutinize the grammar in Bush’s sentence quoted in the last paragraph.

The Article:

WASHINGTON – President Bush on Friday, May 20, 2005,  said he would veto legislation that would loose restrictions on embryonic stem cell research and expressed concern about human cloning research in South Korea.

“I’m very concerned about cloning,” the president said. “I worry about a world in which cloning becomes accepted.”

White House deputy press secretary Trent Duffy said the work in South Korea amounted to human cloning for the sole purpose of scientific research. “The president is opposed to that,” Duffy said. “That represents exactly what we’re opposed to.”

South Korean researchers, funded by their government, reported producing human embryos through cloning and then extracting their stem cells. It is a major advancement in the quest to grow patients’ own replacement tissue to treat diseases.

The president also threatened a veto of legislation that would clear the way for taxpayer money to be spent on embryonic stem cell research.

A measure by Reps. Mike Castle, R-Del., and Diana DeGette, D-Colo., would lift Bush’s 2001 ban on the use of federal dollars for research using any new embryonic stem cell lines. Bush said he would veto such a measure if it reached his desk.

“I made very clear to Congress that the use of federal money, taxpayer’s money, to promote science which destroys life in order to save life – I’m against that,” Bush said. “Therefore, if the bill does that, I would veto it.”

How Big is the Solar System?

Recently I had a conversation about the relative size of the solar system. If the sun were the size of a basketball, how big would the earth be and how far away from the basketball would it be?

The earth would be about the size of a pinhead, and it would be about 90 feet (or about a third of the length of a football field) away from the basketball.

I was about to create a spreadsheet to stretch this out to the rest of the solar system and beyond, but I had a hunch that somebody probably already did that. I found John Silveira did a great job, so rather than just rehashing things here myself, I recommend you read his article and walk away in awe.