| Submitted by: Mark R. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 15 February 2005 |
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A big part of this is that whoever wrote the descriptions had interesting things to say about the specimens and often some wit. An example is some wolves bringing down a deer and having one panel looking at the situation from the wolf's point of view, what he has to gain, what are the dangers. Then it looks at it from the deer's point of view, such as what action might it take. It has flight or multiple ways of fighting.
One of the first things you see coming in is a big pterodactyl mock-up. This display is how the earth formed, and they get to the Mesozoic a little further on, but being that they are going to get to dinosaurs eventually, they want the visitor to see it. If you have any connection to dinosaurs, let people know right away, that is the first rule of museums as I said earlier.
In any case they start with an exhibit on the first few minutes of time and then how the earth formed. This section makes liberal use of making objects transform in front of your eyes using half-silvered mirrors.
They have a piece on something I had never heard of, hurricane balls. It was about the size of a football and is generally natural material blown together. They have a big walk-through mockup of a cave. The sort of odd fact they have is that bluejays use ants as insect repellent. They crush ants and spread the pulp on their wings. The formic acid kills or repels other insects. Another place they have an exhibit where you race a bird's reaction time. Good luck.
They have their share of stuffed animals including one that shows eagles having taken a baby lamb. They have to explain that is a stereotype (perhaps they mean myth) or that is very rare if it ever happens. They have an extended display of stuffed animals of the African veldt. They explain how these animals were taken so it does not look quite so bad that they have all these animal remains. They want you to know that these did not come from poachers.
A surprising exhibit is two mummies. It is a reasonable exhibit, but is don't think of them as natural history. I guess there is an issue of what is art and what natural history. If you show how Indians decorated their homes it is natural history. If they are French it is art.
At the end of the museum was a temporary exhibit of photography of wildlife diversity. This is just good photography from nature and they have a film saying how they got the pictures. I want to know how they timed them to get just the right instant. One shot shows a salmon jumping directly into the mouth of a bear. Apparently salmon are so plentiful that a bear only has to open his mouth. The bear has a look of pure joy on his face, but I keep thinking of the point of view of the salmon. 'So this is it. I swim all this way to spawn and one wrong leap and that's it? I'm not a Papa, I'm croquettes? This is just not fair! Look, let's be reasonable about this. Let's make it two out of three.'
Driving toward Huntsville you would swear you were out in the wilderness in the middle of nothing. Oh, you pass a restaurant or two, mostly sort of dives. Then you see some street lights and a house and it looks like a pretty nice house. Suddenly you realize that you are in the posh section of a town you have not gotten to. Then you get to it.
We got a room at a Days Inn. I think we saw the last two-thirds or so of The War Wagon.
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09/11/97--Huntsville, Alabama: U.S. Space & Rocket Center:
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Up about 7 AM. There is a continental breakfast, but it isn't very good. I had cereal and a Crispy Creme doughnut. Crispy Creme seems to be very popular in town here. Actually they are supposed to be healthier than Dunkin Donuts according to Consumer Reports, I think they may have less fat and are somewhat smaller.
We got to the U.S. Space & Rocket Center about a half hour before it opened. No point in just sitting around the room and they might have schedules out early. Nope. They have an SR-71 Blackbird parked in front of the museum. I guess there are a lot of them around as surplus. There are stealth planes for spying these days.
As we wait outside the space center I can look into the souvenir shop. They seem to have a whole shelf of Star Wars books for the younger set. Twenty years ago I was pretty enthused about Star Wars. Now I kind of wish it would go away. It has become a Star-Trek-like phenomenon.
Well, at 9 AM we went in. This already looks like it is on a higher level than the Houston Space Center. The IMAX film is no longer an option, it is bundled in with the admission, $14 but we get a 20% AAA discount.
After a short tape retrospective, there is a history of rocketry with names like Tsiolkovsky, Oberth, Goddard, and local hero Werner Von Braun. Interestingly, Von Braun was tutored in music by Paul Hindemuth. They have a documentary narrated by Walter Cronkite on the life of Von Braun. I wonder if it was from the series called 'The 20th Century' that used to run on CBS. It turns out the A4 (which is better known as the V2) was more dangerous to POWs and Jews than to Brits. 10,000 prisoners died building them and only 3000 British died from fired A4s (and 6000 were injured).
One problem is that there are too many recordings being played to close together. You hear a sort of babble.
We tried using the hands-on exhibits, some of which seemed to be out of order. Ones with joysticks seem to be broken, not surprisingly. Kids come along and overpower them. The demonstration of Waldos was poorly designed. Objects to pick up were outside of the range of the Waldos.
At 10 AM we filed out to the busses for the tour of the Marshall Space Flight Center. The U.S. Space & Rocket Center is at least nominally the Visitor Center for the Marshall Space Flight Center. They gave a few plugs for their Space Camp. And they gave a history of the space flight center and former Redstone arsenal. It turned out the Visitor Center is roughly to hell and gone away from the actual Marshall Space Center.
Huntsville was involved in weapons manufacturing during World War II. At the end of the war the base was put up for sale, but before it could be sold the government decided to use captured German rocket scientists to develop a weapon for the Cold War. Huntsville was chosen for rocket development. Von Braun and a hundred and nineteen German colleagues of Von Braun came to Huntsville for missile research. These scientists, earmarked for special treatment by having a paper clip put on their files, They were transported to the United States faster than American troops. The code name for the operation to bring them to America was Project Paperclip. Officially they were prisoners of war, but their only punishment was to relocate from Germany to Alabama. Von Braun was made the director of the Marshall Center.
The bus brought us to the Marshall Space Center where we saw a short film telling us what a great bargain the space program is, and again selling NASA for spin-offs. People would probably not be here if they did not believe in the space program. They tie the space station to AIDS research. The problem is there are other things as expensive and far less intelligent that the government spends on, but the space program is high-profile. That makes it a target.
Still, if you have been reading you know that the space program may or may not justify itself with spin-offs. It is important even if it does not justify itself with immediate payoffs. It is like telling a man in a burning building that the view is ever so much nicer over on the fire escape.
We are taken to rooms where the airlock and two of the modules for the space station are being constructed. One is being constructed in a clean room.
Next stop is the inevitable rocket garden. This one has a Saturn 1, a Redstone, a Jupiter (with and without C), and Apollo capsule and a V2. There were a couple other missiles I did not recognize and I did not get the names.
The bus took us back to the space center for the IMAX presentation. They call this IMAX but the theater is what I thought was Omnimax. It is a spherical theater. I wonder if IMAX bought out Omnimax. We got our usual seat in the center but somewhat forward. I am not saying I recommend those seats, it is just where we usually end up in an IMAX or Omnimax theater. Wherever you sit, Omnimax looks funny anyway.
The movie Cosmic Voyage was the best IMAX or Omnimax film I ever remember seeing. It was a variation of the old 'Powers of Ten' idea. They pack a lot of science in a little forty-five-minute production. They tell you about how Galileo used the telescope and then in increasing powers of ten they take you out to the edge of the known universe, then back you go to talk about the invention of the microscope and down you go in powers of ten to the size of quarks. Then you go back to the time of the Big Bang and you see the universe forming and the evolution of life. And they tell you about the search for planets with around other stars and the search for intelligence, always rendered with great imagination. This was better than Mission to Mir or The Fires of Kuwait. The latter had been the best IMAX production I remember seeing.
When I was a young lad I used to watch Walt Disney. (Maybe it was called Disneyland in those days.) They would say 'From Frontierland, Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter' or 'From Fantasyland...' or 'From Adventureland...' Almost never would there be something from Tomorrowland. Disney only did three or four programs from Tomorrowland in spite of them being some of his most popular programs. He did Man in Space, Man and the Moon, and Mars and Beyond. I still remember these programs, even though I was only five or six at the time they ran. They had a small exhibit reminding us of the programs and playing excerpts from each. I look at them as an adult and they do not seem really well done. Then there will be one scene where animated umbrella-like spacecraft head off for Mars, and my knees get weak, and I want to be on one of them. Well, they did use Chesley Bonestell illustrations and had Werner Von Braun explaining the science. Evelyn checked with the souvenir shop. They are not available on tape. Even after repeated requests to Disney Enterprises, the company refuses to release them on tape.
There is also a display on the famous articles in Colliers, illustrated by Chesley Bonestell, talking about space flight and how it might be sooner than people think. It is now generally assumed that the Colliers articles and the Disney programs were important in John Kennedy's decision for what strategy the United States would take to counter the Russians putting a satellite into orbit. Kennedy decided we would go to the moon and set that marvelous deadline. And, of course, we landed a man on the moon in 1969 rather than explain to people that 1970 would have still been in the same decade.
The exhibit Journey to Jupiter has a double purpose. The first is to spark people's imagination in space and the second is to acknowledge a debt to science fiction for already having sparked imagination. The entrance-way has a display of pulp magazine covers and the old Chesley Bonestell Colliers covers, science fiction toys and models. A tape playing tells the visitor about the exhibit, about plans for space, and about how important science fiction has been in forming the current space program. As a nearly life-long fan of science fiction, the acknowledgment of the debt looks a lot like class to me.
On they outside there are educational devices that are a lot like amusement park rides, but never actually placed in that context. The centrifuge can whirl up to thirty or so people up to a harmless three Gs, all the while a TV screen tells them about G-forces in space flight.
While we are in line I notice a T-shirt worn by a guy in the Air Force. |
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| Copyright © - "Mark R. Leeper" |
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