Random thoughts, a meme of sorts, aka Part The Third

[mrz80]

lilfish posted some random thoughts. I responded to one. Then the sleep deprivation took over and I started spouting some randoms of my own, observations from the day's trip to Herndon, VA and Washington, DC, to see the two halves of the National Air and Space Museum with Amanda and Laura

Comments

Concur on that SR-71

[smitty1e]

Definitely the intersection of art and engineering.
OTOH, I thought the Enola Gay was an interesting piece of history to gaze upon, having been to Nagasaki and seen the receiving end.

Re: Concur on that SR-71

[mrz80]

(*obsessive compulsive historical mode on *)
I would agree with the sentiments, but Enola Gay didn't drop the bomb on Nagasaki; Bock's Car carried the Fat Man. Interestingly, Bock's Car was not the usual plane flown by the mission commander Major Charles Sweeney and his crew. His "usual" ride, The Great Artiste, was equipped with the radiological and other instrumentation to observe the Hiroshima bombing. Rather than move the scientific equipment around, the crews of Bock's Car and The Great Artiste swapped airplanes. Also, Nagasaki was the secondary target. The primary target, Kokura, was covered with clouds and a visual bombing run couldn't be made. Finally, due to time and fuel consumption brought on by the three fruitless runs at Kokura, Sweeney couldn't make it either to Tinian or Iwo Jima, and made an emergency landing at Okinawa with his tanks just about empty.
(*obsessive compulsive historical mode offAnother interesting moment, brought on by the presence at the Dulles site of a Posidon C-3 SLBM; how do you explain the

[lesh11]

Is the Spruce Goose at the Smithsonian now? I saw it about 15 years ago in California when it was being displayed with the Queen Mary. It was quite the amazing display, they played a movie about it, at the end of the movie the screen rolled up and the plane was behind the screen. As I recall part of one of the wings was open, I dont remember if you could walk in it or only look, but it was about three stories tall.

Does the Smithsonian still have the Apollo capsule and back-up Skylab on display? It was suprising how small the Apollo capsule was, and Skylab was a cool flashback from my grade school days.

Quark, theres something I havn't thought about in forever, thanks for the memory.

[mrz80]

They had a model of the Goose, alongside a same-scale model of the DC-3 they have hanging in the gallery. Laura kept looking at the models, looking at the DC-3, looking at the models... :-)

Columbia, the Apollo 11 CM, is on display in the lobby; one of the later CMs is in the lunar exploration gallery, hanging from the ceiling. The CM from the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (I saw that launch from inside KSC thanks to Dad working for NASA) was displayed along with an Apollo SM and a Soyuz.

Skylab is still there; Laura in particular was mondo impressed with it. Somewhere in my files I've still got a whole slew of press releases and photos from Apollo and Skylab that Dad brought home from work. A few weeks ago I was going through some stuff and found a bunch of Shuttle mission patches and promptly choked up when I came across STS-51L. That's still one of the "landmarks", like "where were you when JFK was shot?" for my parents.

[joker2]

Crud, wish I'd kept up and known y'all were in the area... some of us have decided that we go there more than 5x/year and therefore got the yearly parking pass...