Science in yo face – Glovers in Spaces

This post is part of a series called Summer 2018

OMG… the museums here in DC are incredible. They are also free. Well.. ‘free’ is relative when you have two kids and every place has a gift shop.

The botanical gardens were pretty cool. You might see a bigger one in some other places, but this was well laid out and had a lot of different plants. Pineapples, coffee, cocoa, and lots of orchids. I even saw Purple Heart which took like 3 years to eradicate in my front yard. I gave it a dirty look.

There were two Air and Space museums. One on the mall and another an hour away at Dulles airport.

The model used for the original Star Trek series. It had been restored and even gets lit up a few times a day.

The space sections were pretty good. There were rockets, missiles, experimental craft and a walk-through skylab. There was even a Hubble mock-up. My son asked “is that the real one?!” “Yes.. Yes it is. They brought it down just to have it on display. They’ll send it back up at the end of the week.”

I enjoyed it, but might be a bit partial to my Johnson Space Center in Houston. The Dulles location though.. oh my.. That had a huge collection of air/space-craft.

The space shuttle holds a special place in my heart as the way we repeatedly and safely accessed space. Rockets are great, but something about a space-plane makes space seem closer.

Also.. Jinx loves Max!

Speaking of space-plane.

SR-71 Blackbird. THE most badass looking plane we have ever created. It looks like a sword with rockets attacked to a wing. Satellites have replaced most of what it could give us, so it had been retired. Some of the stories from the pilots are fascinating.

Also, one of the Transformer movies, they recorded a scene in here. This plane ended up being Jetfire, a Decepticon that switched sides to the Autobots. Jetfire was a big deal when I was a kid. Who-so-ever could convince their parents to get them one would be king of the playground. Sadly, I was not king of the playground.

And this leads us right into the..

DANGERZONE!

I loved me some F-14 Tomcat. I must have seen F-14 deck launches and landings a thousand times(only half from Top Gun). Those were good days. 80’s movies, Kenny Loggins, a sane-ish Tom Cruise..

There were a bunch of WWI and WWII planes. Even a little Messerschmitt Me-163 Komet. It was a rocket propelled plane the Germans put into service.

And then there was this…

World’s smallest plane built either in the 60’s or 50’s.

I just… I don’t…

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