It’s not an easy task to explore the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC on a single day, especially for a World War-II enthusiast like myself who have the scope to see all the models of the aircrafts used in the Second World War with all the information and simulated videos.
Interestingly on a cold winter morning, when I went to the Smithsonian Museum for the first time in my life, it was not the World War-II section which grabbed my interest; rather it was the space section.It started with the ‘Moon stone’There was a reason though. The person who took me there (a relative of mine who lives in Maryland) told me that in winter, most of the establishments in Washington DC go under necessary repair or renovation as the pressure of visitors and other people is usually low in this season. I found repair work going on at the Capitol Hill as well as at Lincoln Memorial.
Repair work was underway inside Smithsonian Museum as well. That’s why the rush of visitors was low at that morning. Besides, the temperature in Washington was way below -10 degree Celsius because of a blizzard which took place a day before.
My relative told me to take a tour at the ‘moon stone’ section. It was a real stone which the Apollo-11 ship brought back from the moon. Apparently that moon stone section is like the Mona Lisa section of Louvre Museum where you always have the biggest rush of visitors. But I was told that as the number of visitors was very low at that day, I might have a shot at touching the Moon Stone.
I went there and after waiting for five odd minutes, I touched the real moon stone. The stone was wedge shaped, flat and very smooth. The size was only three or four centimeters in length. It was so artificial and just like ordinary stones, very different from what I had imagined. Anyway the very thought of touching the moon gave me chill through my bone.The space shuttle sectionRight by the side of ‘Moon Stone’ section, there was the gate of space shuttle section. I entered there and a world of wonder was waiting there for me. Whoever said the passion and curiosity for space has fallen to the wayside obviously hasn’t been to the Space shuttle section of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.
The best part of the place is that there’s so much to see and immense amounts of history not just to witness but interact with and read up on. My relative and I patrolled through here at a relatively quick pace, and we were still there for almost four hours.
Art, tools, newspaper clippings and photography, including moon boots, space suits and even artifacts dating from the first spacewalks by Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov and American astronaut Edward White were available to see inside the space section.
Close-up artifacts include delicately preserved space suits, what the section terms as the “personal spacecraft,” from missions including Gemini IX-A and Apollo 17, demonstrating how these items have changed over time to better accommodate pressure constraints in space as well as temperature shocks inside suits.
During the first spacewalk, Leonov’s suit nearly killed him as it unexpectedly ballooned during the excursion. Later on, during a 1966 Earth orbital mission, fog clouded Gene Cernan’s visor because his suit wasn’t cooling properly. Mastering both these malfunctions have been key for developing the suit and insuring the safety of astronauts in later missions. Astronauts now have a rotary knob that controls the internal temperature of their suits, a uniform that can withstand everything.
Crisp, enveloping visuals of space were also on display, as well as some of the progressively less bulky cameras that captured them, another physical embodiment of how much space travel and the tools used during trips have changed.Training day for a space enthusiastI had learned several interesting facts from the displays there. I had learned that to date, 211 individuals have had the privilege of doing a spacewalk. Some of these excursions have taken place during several Apollo missions to the moon and shuttle trips to painstakingly repair the Hubble Space Telescope and construct and maintain the International Space Station.
I was enthralled to see the lunar module of Apollo-11 with which Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin Aldrin first went to the moon. However I remembered that the lower body of the lunar module still remains in the moon surface and the upper part of the lunar module is orbiting in the space. I asked one of the museum staffs and she told me that it was a replica of the original lunar module.
The relatively newer collection at the space section was the space shuttle Discovery. I was overwhelmed to see that because I remembered that I read in the newspaper in 2011 that the discovery shuttle was handed over to the Smithsonian museum for display.
Discovery is one of the most celebrated space shuttles. It was the first of three orbiters retired from NASA’s shuttle fleet. Its final mission, STS-133, launched Feb. 24, 2011, and landed March 9.It completed 39 missions, spent 365 days in space, orbited the Earth 5,830 times and traveled 148,221,675 miles.
A number of Discovery’s missions were associated with technological and scientific achievements, including the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit in 1990 and the deployment of the Ulysses solar probe the same year. Discovery was also the first space shuttle to visit the International Space Station and delivered its largest laboratory.
After roaming around the space section of the Smithsonian for more than five hours, I realised one thing that for an aviation and space enthusiast this place is the ‘Mecca’. I understood why the Air and Space Museum is USA’s most visited museum and second in the world only to Paris’ Louvre Museum.
(April 12 is celebrated as the International day of human space flight)
Thursday, April 25, 2024
