As planned, we went to the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum located near Dulles Airport. This is a relatively new facility. The main A&S is located on the Mall in DC. We actually took a bus from a stop a couple of miles from the campground. It drops you right at the museum front door after about a 1/2 hour of travel, sweet!
Our main objective was to see the Space Shuttle Discovery and it was great. It appears as if it just completed a mission. It shows the streaks and stains from its re-entry after nearly 40 missions. No polishing or painting.
The Discovery was in service from 1984 to 2011 and last flew the 133rd Space Shuttle Mission in 2011. It was the longest serving Shuttle in the fleet of six. 39 missions, 150 million miles. Wow, some frequent flyer points there. As you know, to protect it from re-entry heat of 2500 plus degrees, it is covered with 24,000 tiles. They are 1 to 4 inches thick and made of a carbon coated, ceramic honey combed, material.
Each tile is individual, with unique identifying information printed on it.
The circles are locations to inject a waterproofing material. If water were trapped in the honeycomb, freezing or boiling could break the tile, causing it to fail. This injection is manual and done after every mission. Pretty labor intensive. I wonder what job skills are required for that job, other than lots of patience. About 100 tiles get replaced after every mission.
Check out the wear and tear.
Note the streaks from the extreme velocity on re-entry.
There are many unique, one of a kind, aircraft here. One that is notable is the B-29 Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. To accommodate the size and weight of that bomb, the bomb bay had to be modified and a lot of stuff, like guns and paint, were removed to save weight to give it the necessary range. It departed from the Aleutian Islands, a round trip of 5000 miles. The max range for the B-29.
We followed an excellent tour about military, historical aircraft, from balloons used in the Civil War for observation to helicopters used in Vietnam. Our docent, retired Air Force, was a walking history book. The tour lasted over 2 hours, with some really interesting side stories. How he remembered all this without a single note was remarkable.
An interesting day!
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