Saturday, May 12, 2012

Day 39: Fresh from Outer Space, The Space Shuttle Discovery!


Still hanging out at Herb and Gayle's in Virginia and seeing the sights...

Dad took Angie and me to the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport which is an extension of the National Aerospace Museum.  It's huge!

And for good reason 'cause planes are big and they've got a lot of them!
You know you're having a good trip when you've seen two SR71 Blackbirds.  We saw another one in Huntsville, AL.

"Enola Gay"
There're so many historic aircraft on display here it's mind boggling.  I guess you could say this is the plane that won the war...

...as it dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

This is a unique German fighter that was recovered at the end of WWII.  It features a propeller on the front and the rear!

Try to count the aircraft!  Boeing 707 prototype in the foreground and a Concord in the distance...

The smaller aircraft are suspended from the hangar on cables.  Looks like a "dogfight" in here!

Dad and me with the beautifully polished Boeing 307, one of the first airliners.

Gayle wasn't with us but interestingly her mother worked as a stewardess, on a similar plane (a DC-3), with an airline called Pennsylvania Central, that became Capital Airlines, and eventually United Airlines!

The supersonic Concord.  We took a short tour and the guide informed us that the Concords used a ton of fuel per passenger to cross the Atlantic and they only carried about 100 passengers!

Planes everywhere!  Some were posed vertically and upside down, so cool!

I want this for Christmas.

Of course, the star of the show, fresh from outer space...

We're so lucky we got to see this.  It only arrived about two weeks ago!
We saw Pathfinder in Huntsville, which was cool, but it was just a mock-up and never went into space.

Check out those battle scars.
They didn't even wash it, just rolled it into the hangar and left it all gnarly!

People we meet are impressed (or think we're crazy) for road tripping in a 1988 Astro Van...

Discovery has been going into outer space since 1984! And that's a much longer trip...


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