Date: 08/ 5/04
Looking across the Mall to at Air & Space from the top step of the National Gallery of Art - West Building.
Date: 08/ 5/04
Astronaut and author Jerry Linenger. He was nice enough to sign my book. I think I'm the only person in the place except for a couple of staff people who recognized him.
Date: 08/ 5/04
Engineering sample of the Hubble Space Telescope. WOW this thing is big. Look how small the people on the bottom right of the picture are.
Date: 08/ 5/04
The door of the Apollo 11 ( first mission to land a man on the moon ) command module.
Date: 08/ 5/04
Space suit that Gene Cernan wore on the moon on Apollo 17 ( the last moon mission ), still dirty with moon dust. The red stripes on the suit designate that he was the commander of the mission. The Pilot's suit was pure white.
Date: 08/ 5/04
The space suits that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldren wore on the moon on Apollo 11 (The first moon mission), both still dirty with moon dust. This was before they where doing the red stripe thing for the commander.
Date: 08/ 5/04
A replica of a probe that landed on the moon to check it's environment before human's went there. In this picture you can see the cylindrical white camera. The crew of Apollo 12 landed right next to this probe on their mission, cut the camera from the probe with bolt cutters and brought it home. They studied it to see how electronics would react to long term exposure to the space environment.
Date: 08/ 5/04
A replica of one of the several satellites that orbited the moon to make maps of it before humans went there. These satellites are how NASA selected the landing sites.
Date: 08/ 5/04
Gianance system for a Miniteman ICBM. Note the big thri-gimbled gyro platform in the top center section.
Date: 08/ 5/04
A VAX 2. Imagine somebody the machine on your desk might be in a museum, just because it's so dam old and worthless.
Date: 08/ 5/04
Notice the freon cooling system located under the seats. Yea, seats, they decided to build this computer with a bench around it so you could sit on it.
Date: 08/ 5/04
SAGE computer, a vacume tube based computer. Actualy this is it's memory module, capible of storing 4096 words of data. And it's only the size of a refrigerator.
Date: 08/ 5/04
Here's a board from one of the uber high tech computers that watched over the Saturn 5 rocket on the ground. That's the rocket that took men to the moon.
Date: 08/ 5/04
Apollo computers used "Core Rope Technology" which was amazingly small and lightweight, for the time. The problem was programming it, it's data is stored by wires that either to or go not get routed through little magnetic doughnuts. In other words all it's programs are hard coded, in the wires, no changing anything without rewireing the computer.
Date: 08/ 5/04
Iridium Satelite. These are what make satelite phones work. Also those big silver coated mirror looking things (The Antennas) make Iridium Flares, one of the cooler things you can see in the night sky, if you know where to look. They can be as bright as the moon for a few seconds.
Date: 08/ 5/04
Douglas D-558-2, this one was the first airplane to go faster then mach 2. Notice the "NACA" logo on it. NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) later became NASA.
Date: 08/ 5/04
A replica of a Mariner space probe, one of which was the first to leave the solar system. Still running and sending back data too.
Date: 08/ 5/04
One of a flight of four or five planes which where first to circumnavigate the globe.
Date: 08/ 5/04
Amelia Earhart's plan that she flew non-stop across the US. The first time that was done by a woman.
Date: 08/ 5/04
Pan of the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy center of the Air & Space museum, taken from walkway where they have all the names of people who "shared the dream of flight" engraved.
Date: 08/ 5/04
This is an unused Mercury Capule. It's still got it's retro pack strapped to the base of it, very rare, since the retro pack was ejected or burned off by the time the capsule was back on the ground. This one was intended to be flown by John Glenn in a repeat of his earlier flight, but with longer duration and more experiments on board. However the flight was cancled.
Date: 08/ 5/04
The Enola Gay, the first airplane to drop a nuclear bomb. It dropped it's bomb on Hiroshima Japan.
Date: 08/ 5/04
Two of the three watches worn on the first moon landing. One of these was worn down to the moon, the other stayed with the Command Module Pilot in lunar orbit. They're wind up watches that can take large G-loads, impacts and full vacuume and keep on ticking. The Speedmaster watch could do this out of the box, they're no different then ones you could have bought in a watch shop at the time.
Date: 08/ 5/04
The inside of the HUGE Steven F. Udvar-Hazy center of the Air & Space museum. It's located at Dulles airport.
Date: 08/ 5/04
Largest, most powerfull, piston airplane engine in the world. Lycoming XR-7755-3. 5000hp. 36 cylinders in groups of four spaced around the circumference of the engine.
Date: 08/ 5/04
The shuttle bus from the original Air & Space Museum building on the national mall to the new center at Dulles Airport. Unfortunatly not as fast as an SR-71 which it's painted with. It takes 45 miuntes to go the 28 miles.
Date: 08/ 5/04
View looking north out the top of the Washington Monument, you can see the Whitehouse.
Date: 08/ 5/04
View looking West out the top of the Washington Monument, you can see the relecting pool, with the Lincoln Monument at the far end.
Date: 08/ 5/04
View looking south out the top of the Washington Monument, you can see the Jefferson Memorial in the distance.
Date: 08/ 5/04
View looking East out the top of the Washington Monument, back across the Mall you can see lots of museums and the capitol building.
Date: 08/ 5/04
The statue of George Washington from 1840. Nobody really liked it so it's been shuffled around alot and not it sits in the basment of the American History Museum. No wonder, the sculpter has George wearing a toga?!
Date: 08/ 5/04
And if you don't do what the IRS says these guys come after you. "Now that is a big door!" Department of Justice.
Date: 08/ 5/04
Ford's Theater, where Lincoln was shot. There's a hard rock cafe next door now. Weird eh?
Date: 08/ 5/04
The Washington Hotel. See the green and white awning on the left side of the roof, I had dinner up there, great view of everything from there, but I forgot to take pictures.
