Huntsville
Sep. 14th, 2004 09:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walbournThe meeting this morning went well. Turned out the people we were meeting at Intergraph had dealt with Vibrant Graphics back in the day--VG was my first job out of school doing drivers for CAD/GIS applications for Protected-mode DOS. I didn't know them personally at the time, but one of them remembered the company and the owners.
Before the meeting we drove around to kill 20 minutes between finishing breakfast and our meeting, and we noticed a Saturn V rocket standing up next to the highway. Turns out the thing to see in Huntsville is the US Space & Rocket Museum. Luckily my traveling partner, Ken, is also into silly crap like that, so we pushed back our return flight by three hours and spent the time after lunch checking it out.
Overall, lots of cool hardware: Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and LEM simulators; V2, Juno, Saturn I, Saturn V (both a real one sitting on it's side in sections and a full-sized standing mock-up), Redstone, and other boosters; an SR-71 'Blackbird', MLRS, a mini-sub; incidental things like suits, equipment, tools, etc.; and while we couldn't check it out first hand this was also home to Space Camp.
There were a few disturbing things like the Army sponsored exhibit clearly meant to encourage
kids to play the 'video game' of shooting down aircraft and join up, and the fact that much of the h/w is just sitting around outside rusting away and growing mildew. Seeing the Saturn V up-close and personal was awesome, but seeing such a proud and irreplaceable piece of equipment rotting away was heartbreaking. You think they could spring for a tarp over the thing if not a shelter. As Ken pointed out, they took better care of their vending
machines. Yeah, the thing is huge. It is also a national treasure and critical piece of history--the others burned up by use, a few pieces are rotting away at other space centers, and it is rumored that at least some of the engineering plans have long since been lost.
The admission included an IMAX film, so we saw Space Station about the ISS. Damn impressive film, with some awesome launch footage from inside the shuttle. I understand ISS is killing off a lot of worthy small projects, that the inability to get a proper safety vehicle running leaves the station way too under-staffed to get any real science done with all the maintenance, people think NASA has totally lost touch with reality, and that the grounded shuttle program may mean the death of NASA as they has been paralyzed by fear of repeated failure. With all that, I remember the idea of a space station and the space program being one of my initial driving motivations to becoming a scientist. More accurately, I'm a tecnologist, but the love of the space program was the seed of my career. There is just something undeniably romantic about living and working in space, even if the reality would have me puking in seconds--one of the exhibits was a mock-up of one of the modules with a slight tilt to give you a sense of weightlessness, and it drove me bananas!
Anyhow, the flights we rescheduled for routed us through Cincinnati instead of Atlanta and gets us home only two hours later. Not much good food in this trip overall--seems like these trips are either feast or famine in terms of food--but smooth travel, decent hotel, and some cool things to do and see to make the long trip worthwhile.
Before the meeting we drove around to kill 20 minutes between finishing breakfast and our meeting, and we noticed a Saturn V rocket standing up next to the highway. Turns out the thing to see in Huntsville is the US Space & Rocket Museum. Luckily my traveling partner, Ken, is also into silly crap like that, so we pushed back our return flight by three hours and spent the time after lunch checking it out.
Overall, lots of cool hardware: Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and LEM simulators; V2, Juno, Saturn I, Saturn V (both a real one sitting on it's side in sections and a full-sized standing mock-up), Redstone, and other boosters; an SR-71 'Blackbird', MLRS, a mini-sub; incidental things like suits, equipment, tools, etc.; and while we couldn't check it out first hand this was also home to Space Camp.
There were a few disturbing things like the Army sponsored exhibit clearly meant to encourage
kids to play the 'video game' of shooting down aircraft and join up, and the fact that much of the h/w is just sitting around outside rusting away and growing mildew. Seeing the Saturn V up-close and personal was awesome, but seeing such a proud and irreplaceable piece of equipment rotting away was heartbreaking. You think they could spring for a tarp over the thing if not a shelter. As Ken pointed out, they took better care of their vending
machines. Yeah, the thing is huge. It is also a national treasure and critical piece of history--the others burned up by use, a few pieces are rotting away at other space centers, and it is rumored that at least some of the engineering plans have long since been lost.
The admission included an IMAX film, so we saw Space Station about the ISS. Damn impressive film, with some awesome launch footage from inside the shuttle. I understand ISS is killing off a lot of worthy small projects, that the inability to get a proper safety vehicle running leaves the station way too under-staffed to get any real science done with all the maintenance, people think NASA has totally lost touch with reality, and that the grounded shuttle program may mean the death of NASA as they has been paralyzed by fear of repeated failure. With all that, I remember the idea of a space station and the space program being one of my initial driving motivations to becoming a scientist. More accurately, I'm a tecnologist, but the love of the space program was the seed of my career. There is just something undeniably romantic about living and working in space, even if the reality would have me puking in seconds--one of the exhibits was a mock-up of one of the modules with a slight tilt to give you a sense of weightlessness, and it drove me bananas!
Anyhow, the flights we rescheduled for routed us through Cincinnati instead of Atlanta and gets us home only two hours later. Not much good food in this trip overall--seems like these trips are either feast or famine in terms of food--but smooth travel, decent hotel, and some cool things to do and see to make the long trip worthwhile.
