| Submitted by: Evelyn C. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 15 February 2005 |
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There was also a section on extinct species (without specimens). The dodo became extinct in 1681, the Great Auk in 1844, and the passenger pigeon in 1914.
The specimens were arranged by topic: a section on different beak types, another on different wings, and so on. The display of the eagle shows it carrying off a lamb-and has a correction posted that when Regar made the display people thought eagles carried off lambs. Now they know better, but it was felt that the display should remain as created for historical purposes.
Their African exhibit said that gnus chew their cud. They also seem to have cloven hooves, so I guess they could be kosher.
The African exhibit also had an explanation of how they collected their specimens under the auspices of naturalists who determined when there were enough animals in a species to warrant culling. However, the exhibit also claimed, 'The giraffe is the tallest mammal in the world.' What about whales?
On the whole, though, it was an excellent museum. I won't say it was stuck out in the middle of nowhere, but it's surprising that it's not in a major city.
'The perfectly adjusted perish with their environments.'
We stayed until the museum closed, then drove on to Huntsville, Alabama.
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Today was devoted entirely to the U. S. Space and Rocket Center at Huntsville (http://www.spacecamp.com/spacecenter/) ($14 minus 20% AAA discount).
Right off, I'll say that Huntsville is much better, and more interesting, and more educational, than the Johnson Space Center (from the perspective of a visitor, of course). This may be because Huntsville is the home of Space Camp and so knows how to do educational displays.
Scheduling is a little easier here. You get assigned tour and IMAX times, and most films or activities happen at frequent intervals. The museum started with a short film, 'Time for Courage,' about the history of Huntsville and the rocket program there. The first display honored the pioneers: Konstantin Eduardovitch Tsiolkovsky, Hermann Oberth, Robert Hutchings Goddard, and Wernher von Braun. Some mention was made of von Braun's work on the V-2 ('the widows and orphans of old London town, who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun'), and even whether or not he realized he was using slave labor. (It is estimated that 10,000 slave laborers died building V-2s, while 'only' 3,000 were killed and 6,000 wounded by them.)
After going through several early stages, the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center was established here in 1960. And next was the bus tour of the Space Center. This started out in a light rain, which luckily let up by the end. The complex itself is not very exciting, but then one military complex looks pretty much like any other. It does have the Saturn 5 Test Stand, the tallest building in northern Alabama and a National Historic Landmark.
Our first stop was at a building with an engineering mock-up of the space station that we could walk through. A videotape talked about spin-offs from space and developments in micro-gravity, such as a protein crystal growth facility. There is a need to grow large high-quality crystals, but it is difficult to do under gravity. It claimed that one dollar invested in space results in seven dollars in economic benefits.
The mock-up has the ESA experimental module, connecting module number two and docking port, the Japanese experimental module (in back), the United States experimental module, connecting node number one, and the United States habitation module. The real connecting node number one has been sent to the Kennedy Space Center already (flown in a Galaxy C5-A). The Russian experimental module will be sent June, 1998, and launched November, 1998.
Everything on the space station goes into a rack: experimental racks loaded by universities, companies, etc.; water-purification racks built by Boeing; and waste management facility (toilet) racks, and so on. The modules hold twenty-four racks each, nodes hold four. Every astronaut is allocated six pints of water every two days for personal needs. After a shower, the water is vacuumed off to be recycled.
We also saw the truck that carried the Hubble, and the Neutral Buoyancy Tank (the tour no longer stops at the latter).
Our next stop was at the manufacturing facility where we saw them building the actual United States habitation module and the United States experimental module (already in the clean room). The latter weighs 30,000 pounds, even with panels of 94% aluminum and 6% copper. People here wore hair nets, gloves, but no beard nets. I guess Tabasco is more sensitive than the space station.
The space station will be 361 feet long and 290 feet wide. It will orbit at 220 miles high and everything will be up there by 2002, taking over seventy Russian, ESA, and United States flights. (The United States is launching the Japanese module.)
On leaving, we saw people smoking under the 'No Smoking' sign outside.
The last stop was at the traditional 'Rocket Park,' with its Saturn 1, Hermes, V-2, Jupiter, Redstone, Jupiter-C, and Apollo Launch Escape System & Command Module.
On returning we saw the IMAX (actually Omnimax) film, 'Cosmic Voyage.' This was basically the same idea as we had seen before in a short film called 'Powers of 10.'
On leaving the film, we passed an exhibit about some of the Disney TV shows about space: 'Man in Space' (March 5, 1955), 'Man and the Moon' (December 28, 1955), and 'Mars and Beyond' (December 4, 1957). He did only three because they were so expensive, and no, they're not available on videocassette.
There were also copies of the illustrations from Collier's: 'Space Station' (Fred Freeman, March 22, 1952), 'Mission to the Moon' (Chesley Bonestell, October 18, 1952), and 'Mission to Mars' (Chesley Bonestell, April 30, 1954).
We then decided to do the 'rides' before lunch. These included the centrifuge, the moon walker, and the space shot. The last was closed until early afternoon, but the first two were running.
The centrifuge runs once an hour. It holds about forty people leaning against couches and spins at 35 miles per hour, resulting in a force of 3 Gs. At 3 Gs it is noticeably harder to lift your arm, and I found it impossible to raise my leg more than a few inches. Picking up your head is a bad idea; every time I tried it I started to feel very motion-sick. (They do warn you about this.)
The moon walker, on the other hand, is a very low-key 'ride.' You are strapped into a chair at the end of a counter-balanced see-saw. When you jump up, you swing slowly up to about fifty feet high or so, then slowly come down on the other side. So it's as if each leap carries you a hundred feet or so. The most bizarre aspect is how slowly you descend and (therefore) how long you are in the air. Normally when we jump we're not in the air for more than a second or two, but here you're 'falling' for several seconds.
These are examples of what I mean by the exhibits being more educational than at the Johnson Space Center. There the closest thing to educational and participatory was the 'Land the Shuttle' video game. (They had that here also, but you sat in a cockpit which moved as you flew the shuttle.)
After a quick lunch, we took the museum tour of the gallery of various spacecraft. Most of this was craft we had seen before (Mercury capsule, Gemini capsule, lunar rover trainer, etc.). There was a piece of Skylab recovered from Australia (we never paid the $300 littering fine). The one thing that was strange is that the tour was given by a kid who was too young to remember most of the space program (he looked like a young college student). He also wasn't entirely informed. He showed us the aerobraking displays, but when I mentioned that they were using aerobraking on the Mars Global Surveyor, he said that they wouldn't be using it for a few years yet-even though the exhibit said otherwise!
We then went on the 'Journey to Jupiter.' The entry area for this had displays of science fiction magazine covers, ray guns, robots, and spaceship models. Also, the introductory film (or films, as there seemed to be several different short ones) had film clips from various science fiction movies. The journey itself is more science fiction than science. The 'passengers' sit in seats on a platform faced a large screen. The platform can be moved up and down, and pivoted in all directions. While you watch the journey on the viewscreen, the platform moves to simulate the actual motion. (They have the same thing at amusement parks for driving a fast car down a mountain road, etc.) The journey itself is accomplished with some sort of fictional faster-than-light travel, since any conventional trip to Jupiter would take at least several months, if not years. After a quick fly-by of the satellites and the Red Spot, there is some sort of emergency caused by radiation, and we have to make a quick return. (This is accurate-the planet's radiation is so strong that the current Galileo mission will pass by Io, the closest satellite, last because it will probably be rendered useless by the radiation that close.) This is mostly an amusement park ride, though using space footage is somewhat more educational.
'Mission to Mars' is a smaller-scale version, where you stand in a small shuttle mock-up and watch space and Martian scenery while you tip to the left and the right. 'Shuttle to Tomorrow' is even milder-it's basically just a film of films from the shuttle with no audience motion. It's dressed up like a shuttle flight of the future, which they think would resemble an airline flight today. There is a pre-flight safety lecture, and they announce that the in-flight movie will be Terminator 12. There is also some product placement for Coke and M&M's.
After this we rode the centrifuge again, and Mark did the space shot (you're strapped into a chair and blasted a hundred feet up at 4 Gs). We finished up with the 'Journey to Jupiter' a second time, and a quick pass through the souvenir shop. (Even the souvenirs here are better-and cheaper-than those at the Johnson Space Center).
We were there when the Center opened at 9 AM, and we left when it closed at 5 PM (actually a few minutes later). We saw almost everything (we didn't see the film on life on the space station, or the rocket park here in any detail). It is open an hour longer during the summer, but I'm sure there are also a lot more families and children then. It was actually pretty empty the day we were there, which meant no real lines for the 'rides.'
Dinner was at the Miwon Korean Restaurant. I had Soon Doo Boo Ji Gae, which I hadn't had in a long time, and Mark had a squid bokum. There used to be a couple of Korean restaurants near home that we went to, but they closed and we miss Korean food. The waitress was worried that we wouldn't like what we had ordered, but when she came back and the plates were empty, she decided we probably liked it. (This was like our experience in Krabi, Thailand, where the five of us ordered an assortment of food under the skeptical eye of the proprietor. When we finished everything except the clam shells, he looked a lot happier.)
On the way back, we stopped at Books-a-Million, a remainder books chain. I ended up buying Gore Vidal's United States, a 1300-page collection of his essays. This is the sort of thing I could never buy if we were flying back. (Whether I really need to add a 1300-page book to my already bloated reading list is another question entirely.)
September 12: Our drive to Chickamauga took us past some poorer towns, with houses with tin roofs. |
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