Flights of Fancy

I flew to Washington, DC, the other week for a quick visit with friends. It never ceases to amaze me that I can have breakfast in La Crosse, catch a flight at the La Crosse Airport, and have lunch on the East Coast. Jet travel is a wonderful invention!

In fact, the entire development of machines able to “slip the surly bonds of Earth” is a fascinating story. Who could have believed that a little more than 60 years would separate the Wright brother’s first controlled flight of a powered aircraft in 1903 and the first steps on the moon in 1969?

I was reminded of these incredible technological leaps and bounds during a stop at the Smithsonian Institution’s Air and Space Museum during my quick trip Out East. I first visited this shrine to flight in 1976, the year it opened. It’s fascinating to take note of not only the advances in aviation since 1976, but the inclusion of new, record-breaking flying machines since that time.

In 1976, the Wright Flyer that Orville Wright piloted on December 17, 1903, hung in the Milestones of Flight Gallery — almost directly above the Apollo 11 command module that carried Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins to the first moon landing in 1969. Today, the fully-restored Wright Flyer sits in its own climate-controlled, darkened gallery, the better to preserve this priceless piece of machinery.

The Spirit of St. Louis still hangs in the main gallery, the side door open to give visitors a glimpse at the cramped, spartan cockpit in which Charles Lindbergh spent 33.5 hours during his non-stop flight from New York to Paris in 1927. For his flight, Lindbergh received the $25,000.00 Orteig Prize.

Hanging near the Spirit of St. Louis is Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne, the first piloted vehicle to fly to an altitude of at least 100 kilometers (62.5 miles) twice in two weeks. For this second flight on October 4, 2004, Rutan won the $10 million Ansari X Prize.

Around the corner of the main gallery hangs another Burt Rutan-designed aircraft — the Model 76 Voyager. Piloted by Dick Rutan (Burt’s brother) and Jeana Yeager, Voyager was the first aircraft to fly around the world without stopping or refueling from December 14 - 23, 1986.

Another Voyager also hangs in the gallery. This is a model of the two deep-space probes launched by NASA in 1977 to explore the outer planets of our solar system and beyond. According to NASA, as of May 2009, Voyager 1 is 16.4 billion kilometers and Voyager 2 is 13.3 billion kilometers from the sun. Both spacecraft are expected to reach interstellar space sometime between 2014 and 2017.

For me, one of the neatest exhibits was tucked away in a corner gallery on the second floor. This is a temporary exhibit featuring paintings by Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean. Bean was the fourth person to walk on the moon in November 1969, and commanded Skylab Mission II in 1973. After retiring from NASA, Bean turned to painting. His primary subject is one he knows best — walking on the moon and the experience of the Apollo astronauts.

Bean brings an engineer’s eye to his paintings, and has the benefit of painting space and objects in space as only someone who has been in space can. His notes accompanying his painting of the expolsion of Apollo 13 take in to account not only the details of the explosion, but also the behavior of exploding particles in the vacuum of space. And there’s even a little bit of moondust — real moondust — incorporated into his paintings.

From Orville Wright setting sail from the sands of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to Alan Bean’s explorations on the Ocean of Storms 250,000 miles away from Earth, it’s staggering to think of how far we’ve come — and gone — since 1903.