Our summer vacation this year was a 10-day trip to Washington DC and Colonial Williamsburg. I can’t imagine that anyone who visits Washington for vacation doesn’t manage to stop at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, since it is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world. Even as we first began to think about our trip, there was no question that it would be one of the must-do attractions, even if it meant missing something else as a consequence.
All of which makes it hard for me to say that it was probably the thing I liked the least of all the things we were able to do in the course of our visit. Perhaps my expectations were too high from nearly a lifetime of imagining what it would be like to visit in person. This was my very first trip to Washington DC, after all, and I’ve had a lot of years to imagine what all of these places were going to be like when I finally got to see them in person. But beyond that, it seemed to me that, unlike the other Smithsonian museums we visited, Air & Space was more like a children’s museum than a serious attempt to curate and present a collection of truly unique and predominantly American historical artifacts. I certainly appreciate the thinking behind making museums as fun learning experiences for children, and I also totally get why the Smithsonian went that way with Air & Space, but my own selfish interest made me actually resent it.
Having said that, though, there is one aspect of the museum which is utterly and undeniably heart-stopping: stepping into the main lobby of the building and seeing all those historical aircraft and spacecraft all in one place. The Spirit of St. Louis, Chuck Yeager’s “Glamorous Glennis” X-1, John Glenn’s “Friendship 7″ Mercury capsule, and the Mack Daddy of them all, the “Columbia” capsule of the Apollo 11 mission.
That’s it in the picture at the top of the post. It’s positioned somewhat inside the lobby so that it is one of the last things you come to on your way into the museum, and it’s frankly rather non-descript compared to the bright orange bullet of the X-1 or the rickety-looking Spirit of St. Louis. It’s completely encased in clear Lucite to keep the millions of little fingers that would otherwise despoil it away, but the exterior of the capsule is dirty brown with scorching from the heat of re-entry, making it look like a large, overused tagine casserole more than the first spacecraft to put humans on the moon. Every replica of an Apollo capsule I’ve ever seen has had the spiffy white, black and red paint job, not the look of one too many macaroni-and-cheese dinners spilled over.
Nevertheless, as soon as I genuinely realized what I was looking at, my whole body buzzed. This was not some model of a space capsule on display, a replica with pretend toggle switches for overstimulated kindergarteners to yank on ten thousand times a day and a worn-out video loop of Neil Armstrong’s “One Small Step” playing over and over. This…ohmygawd…THIS is the Real Thing. And for a second, I was six years old again myself.
Later that day, as we explored the Museum of American History, I started to get used to that feeling. Almost every single object you see in that museum is the Real Thing, and it seems like there is not an imaginable treasure of American history that they do not possess. When we saw the Star Spangled Banner, I actually had to sit down for a minute. But the first and best thrill was seeing that burned-up little capsule.
The museum is roughly divided into one half about space and the other half about aircraft. The space half has to content itself with mock-ups and replicas out of necessity. The original rockets, satellites, and such either remained in space or burned up on the way back down. All of the actual lunar modules that landed on the Moon are still there, of course (in fact, you’ve probably seen these new photos from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter just in the last couple of days). The LEM I am standing in front of in the photo above was actually built for use in the space program, but was surplussed after the Apollo program was cancelled. Even that degree of provenance, though, makes it a very weak sister to the three mission capsules in the lobby (Apollo, Mercury and Gemini), and it’s location down with the other mock-ups is an acknowledgment from SI that it really doesn’t count.
Tucked away in a weird place, though, is ANOTHER real Apollo capsule, fastened to a wall just high enough to keep it out of reach of visitors so that it does not have to be sealed in plastic. If I remember the signage correctly, it is the Apollo 8 capsule that orbited the Moon during the Christmas before the Apollo 11 mission and told all of us enthralled little children on Earth that they had seen Santa Claus.
The lack of protective Lucite and the angle at which the capsule is mounted to the wall give you a much better look inside the capsule than is possible with the Apollo 11 craft. The “couches” for the three astronauts look decidedly uncomfortable and reminded me more of Dick Cheney’s torture chambers than a ship that sailed to the moon and back.
Even though we’d like to go back to see Washington in a couple of years, I doubt I’ll bother with the Air & Space Museum again. Still, as we’ve all been reliving those exciting and tense moments of 40 years ago these last few days and watching the joyful giddiness of Walter Cronkite announcing the moon landing every time the news programs eulogize him, I’m genuinely gratified that I had the chance to see the Real Thing in person once in my life.
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