Museum, Preparation

Today, I went to the National Air and Space Museum with one of my Scout friends. It's in a new building now – it used to be downtown, near the Mall, but it's out near Dulles now. There were four of us there: me and my friend plus his father and his friend. We split into two pairs to explore the exhibits.

The museum was as fun as it was last time, back in DC. It looks more like a hangar now, which is a good change, and I think it may be larger. However, the cafeteria, which wasn't particularly good in the first place, has now been reduced to a glorified McDonald's. Fortunately that's not what we came for.

A few memories I have of exhibits there:

• A Langley flier. Famous as one of the last near-misses in the quest for heavier-than-air flight. Looking at it, our guesses were that poor wing and propeller design (the former only one curved sheet, the latter hardly curved at all) were the causes of failure. Of course, we know nothing about aerodynamics, so make your own judgment.
  
• The Enola Gay was there. B-29 Superfortress, if I recall correctly; it was mostly unpainted.
  
• There were several interesting helicopters and ... autorotors? I don't remember what the prop-planes-with-heli-rotors-on-top are called. Especially notable in that corner were the helicopter with two rotors whose circles intersected, and the helicopter with apparently only one rotor and no tail rotor. I wasn't sure how it kept from spinning – my friend had suggestions, but they didn't sound plausible to me.
  
• There was an entire section of airplane engines as well, most of them for prop planes. Standing in front of one pair of engines, we spent a couple minutes trying to identify which corresponded to which sign, since both were 4-cylinder inline with the same displacement. I finally identified the bolt sockets on one from the blurry picture of a plane containing it before my friend noticed that the stands were marked with the names.
  
• There was an entire case of prototype spacesuit designs which the Apollo program never got to use. The sign advertised that some were 'hard' suits, with higher internal pressure (convenient for reducing difficulties with the bends) and constant volume (making them possibly easier to move in). The sign also said they were working on them for use on the Mars mission.
  
• There was also an android which NASA used to test the suits.
  
• Last of all: There was the model of the 'mother ship' from Close Encounters of the Third Kind on exhibit. The sign pointed out that the animators, perhaps in their boredom, attached many joke items to the hull of the model, including an R2D2, a mailbox, a cemetery, a pair of airplanes, and many other things. My friend and I found most of the items they listed on the sign, with the exceptions of the VW bus (which a stranger pointed out), the mailbox, and the submarine. We never did find the latter two, but we found a couple other modeled items instead, including a door (like the door of a house, one of those four-pane jobs) and a 55-gallon drum (also known as a 44-gallon drum if you're British not American not from the US).
  

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After returning from the museum, I got together materials for the dorm room at school and packed them in my mother's car. We then drove to the storage locker, where we picked up several more items for my dorm room at school, and repacked the car to contain them all. It looks like we can get just about everything in just two trips.

"Just about everything" will include my dorm fridge, my desktop computer, my DVDs, my clothes, my laundry detergent, my shower stuff, my other bathroom stuff, my bookcase, my textbooks, my notebooks, piles of mass-market paperback novels (mostly sci-fi), and other sundries. It will not include the paintings I got at the Prevention of Blindness thrift store a few weeks back. Since I probably won't get to hang them, I'll have to arrange to lean them against things, and in the meantime they shouldn't be in the room.

And since I will have to get up at 6:00 a.m. tomorrow, I shouldn't stay up typing. Adios!