Click on images below to enlarge:
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| Steven Udvar-Hazy Center of the Air and Space Museum
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| Approaching the Steven Udvar-Hazy Center. It's big, but this pictures
doesn't convey that fact well.
| The sculpture, Ascent, out front. Imagine what you will. I
think of a bird taking flight or a radar beam sweeping the sky.
| Yup, the center's in an aircraft hangar. Actually multiple hangars.
The picture of the outside doesn't do justice to its size. This is our
first view inside the center.
| A panoramic shot of the map of one of the center's hangars (the Boeing
hangar). The map shows most (every?) plane and how far from the ceiling
it hangs. The observant can probably identify the location and subject
of every picture I took with the help of this map. I don't care enough
to bother.
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| My first shot attempting to capture the vastness of the space. It shows
a few planes and the width and height of the end of the hangar.
| This shot succeeds at capturing the vastness of the space.
Excellent when viewed full-sized so one can fully appreciate the
number of planes in here.
| An excellent (when seen full-sized) view of planes swooping
above.
| Another view of the airplane hangar. It contains multiple passenger
jets! The Concorde is in the foreground.
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| An excellent or at least certainly worth watching 360-degree panoramic
video of the center's main hangar as seen from a second-floor walkway in
the middle of it. It's enormous, fitting more than a hundred planes.
| Looks like a missile with a seat for a pilot.
| A flying wing.
Incidentally, there were many other flying wings and hang gliders.
| An ultra-light helicopter.
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| A Bede BD-5B (N234BD), designed to be built at home from a kit. It
supposedly handled excellently but didn't become popular because it was
difficult for consumers to acquire a suitable engine for the plane at
the time (the 1970s).
| Other light-weight helicopters, and the twin-body Virgin Atlantic
GlobalFlyer, which Steve Fossett flew solo around the world non-stop
without refueling.
| The Hiller XH-44 Hiller-Copter is remarkable because of its history.
See the next picture.
| Details about the Hiller XH-44
Hiller-Copter.
It was built by a nineteen-year-old.
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| A map of another hangar (the McDonnell hangar). This displays ships and
rockets and other items related to space travel.
| The hangar easily fit the space shuttle Enterprise, with room to spare
(as you can tell from the quantity of other things in it).
| Staring down the nose of the space shuttle Enterprise.
| A 315-degree panoramic video of the space hangar.
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| The Redstone Missile. This type of missile launched satellites and
astronauts in the 1950s and early 1960s.
| The mobile quarantine facility that NASA uses for returning astronauts.
| The model ship used in the movie Close Encounters of the Third
Kind.
| Details.
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| Lots of satellites.
| The main engine of the space shuttle, a massive piece of precise
equipment. The space shuttle has three of these.
| I took this picture not for the upper stage rocket but rather for the
series of computers running the space programs through the 1980s. They
look primitive now. I'm amazed they could do what was necessary.
| A satellite with umbrellas and spikes?
Actually, it's a Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS), a type of
communication satellite placed in geosynchronous orbit.
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| The Mighty Mouse missile. Yes, that's it beyond the sign. It's only
3.5 feet long. (I know the perspective makes it look smaller, but
regardless it's tiny.) "A single hit ... could destroy an enemy
bomber." Mighty mouse indeed.
| A 270-degree panoramic video of northern Virginia, including a plane
landing at the airport, taken from the observation tower seen in this picture. Gosh Virginia is
green.
| A 180-degree panoramic video taken from the other end of the observation
tower. These two videos together look in every direction.
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| Dulles Airport Snack
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| One corridor in Dulles airport, taken to go in my collection of photos
of lines of flags. No, I don't know why they're there.
| The airport's Potbelly, where I got lunch.
| My sandwich. Eh. At least it provided sustenance. It was dry, but
this could be my fault because I asked for only a little mayo. The
bun was boring, crumbly wheat bread. But it provided sustenance.
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| Salt Lake City Airport Art
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| In Salt Lake City's airport, a panoramic shot of a display of
paintings of Utah. I like them all.
| The label accompanying the paintings shown in the previous picture.
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Elsewhere in the airport, I saw a long array of stunning photographs
of Utah's wilderness.
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