smacky and bucky

"The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Washington Dulles International Airport is the companion facility to the Museum on the National Mall. The building opened in December, 2003, and provides enough space for the Smithsonian to display the thousands of aviation and space artifacts that cannot be exhibited on the National Mall. The two sites together showcase the largest collection of aviation and space artifacts in the world."

Fifteen miles from our house and we had never been. Can you believe it?

Sunday morning we returned to our house after an overnight trip to attend Laura's high school reunion (Grandma watched the kiddo). It was shaping up to be another hot day, with our A/C not being able to keep up. I said, "Let's go to the Air and Space Museum at Dulles!" Indoors, cavernous, and definitely properly air conditioned. A few minutes later we were in the car!

 The Space Shuttle Discovery is housed there (and an Air France Concorde, along with hundreds of other planes, all indoors, to give you a sense of the size of this place!). I had never seen any of the space shuttles in person, so seeing one up close was awesome. I told Henry (22 months old) that it was a space ship like Buzz Lightyear flies in, and then he totally got it! 

Close-up of the nose section. Did you know that the black tiles are individually numbered and coded? Smart thinking!

It was actually pretty emotional seeing the flag on that giant ship. I didn't expect to feel that.

A communications satellite hangs above the shuttle.

I have (at least) one more post coming about this trip. Stay tuned! 

Related news: HUGE congratulations to NASA for safely landing Curiosity on the surface of Mars! The little guy already sent back his first picture (the shadow of one of his wheels on the surface!) Here's what it looks like:

Being a child of the '80s, I can't look at this guy and not think of the movie "Short Circuit!"

Related link: Here's a letter written in 1970 by Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger, then associate director of science at NASA to Sister Mary Jucunda, a nun stationed in Africa who had written him and asked how we could afford to go to space when children were starving on Earth. His response to her is freaking amazing: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html.