Day Two: Cosmosphere

I posted a few pics from Day One when we went to get our tickets for the Cosmosphere, but whoa.







For a start, the SR71 Blackbird hanging in the lobby low enough you can touch it, it's huge. The lobby alone is worth the visit, with the Blackbird and the life-size shuttle sculpted out of the one wall, the X15 hanging overhead. You can see down to the lunar module in the museum proper from the lobby as well.





The Cosmosphere's collection runs a (distant) second only to the Smithsonian, which has loaned them much of the cool stuff on display. And, I gather, the Soviet stuff, this is the most you'll find outside Russia.





And, fittingly enough, they even have pieces of the Berlin Wall on display.





We did the All Missions Pass, and I think in retrospect it was a slight mistake. Not that it wasn't all worth taking in, just that with Mo's limitations, it was more than we could realistically do in a day. She was great through the IMAX movie (a way cool CGI bit about the creatures who swam across Kansas back when it was much wetter). We went through the museum prior to our scheduled time for the planetarium, which was to be followed by Goddard's Lab.








The first meltdown happened in the museum, about the point where we were checking out Glamorous Glennis, the plane that Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in.






Mo started whining and pulling on her sister's sleeve and generally being a pickle, and when I asked her what the problem was, she could only say, 'Belly button!'





So I made Em let Mo see her belly button, to no avail. Then I realized, there was background music, heavy on bass, moody and ethereal. As soon as I got Mo clear of that room and that music, she was fine again.



But going straight into the Planetarium show?



I went and asked (knowing a lot of shows were sold out) about switching some times around, and the Cosmosphere folks were great, swapped me to a later Planetarium. We got lunch and headed for Goddard's Lab.







The Lab stuff must have been cool, because at one point the doors seemed like they were going to be blown open by the explosion inside, but by then me and Mo were banished to the hall. They lock the doors from the inside to prevent late seating in the dark, safety reasons, and we couldn't get back in if we wanted to. Em and Grandpa Calvin hung in there, but I couldn't get Mo to settle down and put a cork in it.





Ditto for the planetarium show when we got to the later appointment for that. I caught enough to learn why Pluto was kicked out of the Planet Club, but that was maybe the first five minutes. I still think of Pluto as a planet, though.



The deal with Pluto is they've found a bunch of other bodies as big and bigger that would have to be planets if Pluto is one. Me, I say, the more the merrier. Why not have 15 planets? 20? What is the proper number of planets for a solar system, anyway? Proper number for what purpose?



The other bummer was the walkway where you can walk around the base of the Titan rocket outside was closed because the weather was supposedly inclement. Cold, yes, but it wasn't raining or anything.



Things I noticed: You didn't get much elbow room if you went to space. I guess you still don't, big as the Shuttle seems. Things take a lot of heat on re-entry. A lot. Like scorching patterns you can see even on the Liberty Bell that spent almost four decades in corrosive ocean water. The Soviets really like spheres. Their satellites, space capsules, even the life support tanks on the capsules, are spherical as a rule. Also, Sputnik is tiny.



Which brings me to one of my rocketry fantasies: I want to put my own satellite in orbit. Not right away, I can't afford such things, but I really believe the average American ought to be able to do pretty much anything today the USSR could do fifty years ago. It's the beauty of capitalism.




And seeing how small Sputnik was, I think it's more possible than ever. You're talking a lot of Newton seconds, but I'll bet it can be done. A cluster of N2000's for the first stage...



Oh, and I noticed that my camera really isn't the man for the job with an environment like this. I cranked the ISO to 1600 which kept the pics from being blurry, but as you can see, the tradeoff is they're noisier than a garage band.



They even make a display out of the IMAX projector, a set of impressive disks and absolutely huge film. Not all things are digital, ya' know?



We made three trips through the museum proper, and each time found little nooks of stuff we'd missed before, like the little theater showing footage from the manned moon missions I didn't hit until trip #3.


Anyways, the place is flat-out neat, and I plan to return.



Dinner was at Spangles, which I guess is sort of a chain, though a tiny one, and good eats all the way.