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Last Tuesday, the Space Shuttle Discovery flew on its carrier aircraft from Cape Kennedy in Florida to Dulles Airport near Washington DC, where it will be housed at the Udvar Hazy branch of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.
Here they are taxiing out (I watched the takeoff on TV; the photos are of the screen)
And takeoff!
The Discovery is special for several reasons that I won't go into. She is currently the longest lived space vehicle that's ever returned to eath (space stations last much longer, but they don't re-enter intact). Discovery logged just over year in space total.
The other reason is when I visited NASA's vehicle assembly building,
Discovery was sitting in one of the vertical bays awaiting transport:
(This photo is of me, with my mobile, with Discovery in the background, taken by someone else on the tour.)
Sorry for the scruffy face. I'd planned to stay in a hotel the night
before during my drive, but it seems that every hotel in the entire
northern half of the state of Florida was booked that night, so I
ended up sleeping in my car at a rest stop.
There was a Mooney fly-in event at the Tennessee Museum Of Aviation last February. My wife and I went along to meet people, see the museum, and do the sit-in-the-cockpit game with some folks that I'd talked to before ahead of time.
My experience with our club's Cessna aircraft was that an iPad didn't
fit between the yoke horns. It seems that a Mooney yoke is wider; it
fits fine:
The museum itself has the usual stuff; engines, vintage fighters.
There's a fairly old Willy's Jeep, which was kind of cool. What
completely surprised me coming around a corner at the back side of the
museum was this:
It's a full-scale model that someone made of the
Airwolf helicopter
from the television show. The creator took a Bell 222 (upon which the
"real" Airwolf was based), made it into a model, then donated it to
the museum. It was utterly unexpected and I was totally floored.
It's nice to be surprised sometimes.
I bought some Mooney instruments from ebay last fall. They were from a late 1960s model, which is the sort of thing I'm hoping to buy in a few short years.
The turn coordinator in those Mooneys was dual powered; that is, it
would work powered by the airplane's instrument vacuum source, OR via
electrical power. The motor in the gyro is apparenlty a multi-phase
AC motor powered by a DC to AC inverter. In the TC that got, someone
had cut the cable from the inverter to the instrument itself.
You can sort of see the back of the TC chassis in the background.
That's the valves and plumbing for the "Positive Control" wing leveler
system. The post-1965 planes had a system that basically used the
TC's sensitivity to bank to kepe the wings level (and thus roughly a
constant heading). It was operated by vacuum; thus the hoses coming
off the back of the TC to controll the parts of the PC system.
The other half of the system. This takes DC input and creates 3-phase
AC to the TC.
So I cut up the cable and spliced each wire together.
Then I tested it by connecting the DC input to the inverter to a test
DC power supply. It worked! That was pretty fun.
The Experimental Aircraft Association in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, sponsors a series of two-day weekend workshops that each the skills for buildin Experimental Amateur-built aircraft. Before this year, I'd taken two of the weekend courses, and this January, I took a third, the avionics (Aviation Electroncs) and wiring course. The workshops travel around the country so that people in different regions can take the courses, but they always have a full set in Oshkosh at the end of January.
I drive around central Illinois a lot, driving on I-74 is pretty much
par for the course. However, when I exit onto I-39 northbound by
Bloomington, Indiana, it usually means I'm going to Wisconsin, and
more often, Oshkosh:
The last time I went to a January workshop, 3 years ago or so, the
travel up was horrid and snowy. That didn't happen this time, but
there was a dusting of snow both mornings I got up there:
Parking outside the EAA museum is always a good thing:
Here's what greeted participants at the start of the class. Yay,
wire and connectors!
The really nice thing about a class like this is that the bag on the
left contains fairly nice tools (crimpers and such) so that you can
get used to making the connections the way they're meant to be made.
We made a wiring harness for a cockpit intercom.
The connector at the left plugs into the back of the radio. The two
white wires at the bottom connect to power and ground. The two shielded
wires going to the two connectors at the upper right are for the
pilot's headset.
I've done lots of soldering work before, so this
part wasn't new. It was useful to learn the technique of setting up a
shielded wire. When we were finished, each of us plugged out harness
into an actual intercom to test it.
What I had NOT done before was some of the crimping techniques. A
piece of wire with some random connectors and crimps.
Also, starting with this, a piece of RG-58 cable:
stripping it:
attaching the center pin:
and finally ending up with a working BNC connector:
is something I'd never done before and was totally worth the cost.
The final project was a mini electrical system.
One power supply (a battery). One fuse. Two circuits, controlled by
a single switch. The black thing on the left of the panel is the fuse
holder. The thing in the middle is the switch to turn on the lighting
circuits. The light on the left is wired the same way as the
navigation lights on an airplane; on or off. The right light goes
through the rheostat (controlled by the knob on the right of the
panel) which acts like a dimmer. When you turn on the switch, the
"navigation" light comes on full brightness. The rightmost light,
which acts as an instrument panel light, comes on with them. You
control the brightness of the "instrument" light with the knob on the right.
Switch on, instrument lights at full brightness:
Switch still on, but instrument lights dimmed considerably:
One of the big pieces of infrastructure built during the Apollo moon program was the Vehicle Assembly Building. It's the really big building at the Kennedy Space Center where they stacked the rockets for the Apollo missions and also assembled the Space Shuttles for launches.
It's a really huge building, and an giant industrial space, and with things moving around inside occasionally, it's a safety issue as well. With all those issues, before recently it was a VIP-type tour that you had to at least know someone to get to see the inside of. Starting in November, NASA opened the building up to the general public. I drove down to Florida this last weekend to take the tour and see it.
It's pretty cool, and really really huge. I'm posting a few photos here. I took a lot more of the inside. While the experience is neat, the pictures don't really show much because there's no reference or scale.
Here's a photo of the outside of the VAB:
The VAB is on the left, and the two buildings on the right are two of the
Orbiter Processin Facilities, where they reforbished the Space
Shuttles after every flight. The two tall vertical grey sections on
the VAB are the doors that open to let stacked vehicles out. They go
most of the height of the building.
Here's a different angle. The next shot is goin to be from fairly
close to the building, showing roughly the area that's circled in
green on this photo.
This shows the bottoms of the two grey doors on one side of the
building. Notice the area between them, circled.
Those tiny openings highlighted in the last shot are three
double-width personnel doors. That gives you an idea of the size of
the VAB.
Now, the VAB is very very cool for a rocket nerd like me. However, I'd like to recommend the Apollo/Saturn Center at Kennedy Space Center for anyone who's even vaguely interested in space travel. It's a really well-put-together museum out on the NASA property. They have a really impressive collection. Apparently the way it works is that you take one of the bus tours to see the launch pads and stuff, which end at the Apollo Saturn Center. You can then take a bus from there back to the main visitor's center, where the big parking lot is.
The centerpiece of the Apollo Saturn Center is an actual Saturn V rocket, which was the rocket that took the Apollo missions to the moon. The first (bottom) stage of the Saturn V was powered by 5 F-1 engines, each of which developed 1.5 million pounds of thrust. This is a photo of the business end of the Saturn V there:
Here are a few goofy road-trip type pictures from the trip down and
back. Here's the interstate sign when I-75 splits off south from I-40
west of Knoxville.
I was pretty cranky on the way down, and I really horrid traffic
problems. That was apparently the spring break that everyone and
their dog was going to Florida. The rest of the pictures were from
the way back. Monday, April 2, on I-75 crossing I-10 northbound.
I saw this billboard a few times and managed to snag a photo of it.
I know the intention is that it means "We're Nuts!", but I can't being
suspicious that this is a front for were-nuts, as in were-wolves,
were-bears. Vegetable Lycanthropes! What insidious monsters would
those be!
The interstates splitting on the south side of Atlanta. I'm taking
the I-285 bypass to the west. That interstate goes very near Atlanta
Hartsfield airport; in fact, the highway goes UNDER one of the
runways.
An airliner on very final approach.
This was a very pretty cloudscape just before I turned off of I-75 in Kentucky.
It's so well-defined, it almost looks like a Terry Gilliam animated
head-of-God should pop out of and start dispensing commandments.