Space, the final frontier

Or so says the Star Trek intro.

The National Air and Space Museum, Steve Udvar-Hazy Center sits fittingly at the edge of the Dulles international Airport. Having time to kill before my companions arrived (see previous post), I hailed an Uber and alit in front of this giant hangar of a building.  

Inside, it was field trip city. The place was enormous enough to absorb many groups of chattering youth, obviously on their last field trip of the semester.

There was a Boeing 707, the first Air France Airbus, helicopters, prop planes, drones, an old Good Year airship, well just about anything that ever flew. Even the basket from an old timey hot air balloon.

I made a beeline for the space hanger in the middle of which is the Space shuttle Discovery. Huge! All around were placards and talking screens describing the outer, innards and daily life aboard the vessel.

Don’t remember what this workhorse shuttle did? Here ya go… The Discovery shuttle only flew in Earth orbit. It completed 39 missions, traveled about 149–150 million miles, made 5,830 Earth orbits, and spent a cumulative 365 days in space. It deployed communications satellites on its first mission, helped launch the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990, flew two Hubble servicing missions, flew two missions to Russia’s Mir space station and docked once, carried John Glenn back to space in 1998, and served as NASA’s “return to flight” shuttle after both the Challenger and Columbia disasters. Discovery’s first ISS docking was May 29, 1999, on STS-96—the first shuttle ever to dock with the ISS.

A don’t-miss-if-you-are-there is the Observation Tower. 7 stories up, 360 degree view, overlooking the Dulles International runways. The jets cane in a continuous stream looking surreal as they silently glided by and touched down, wheels smoking. I got overly excited when I realized the guy standing next to me was calling out each plane and its original. “That’s British Airways coming in from Amsterdam.”  “That’s United from Brussels” and “wow, that’s Saudia coming in from Jeddah”. 

PS. Why do the planes wheels smoke when they land? I had to look this up…”In the air, an airplane’s wheels are completely stationary (not spinning). When a heavy jet touches down at speeds often exceeding 150 mph, those motionless tires hit the concrete and are violently dragged until they accelerate to match the aircraft’s ground speed” Hats off to the men and women who designed these things. This is just one of a million engineering decisions that had to be made. What should you make the tires out of to withstand that stress?