Washington DC 2003

My companion took some photos of the 6 wind turbines that generate 9 MW of power for Community Energy Inc. near Somerset, Pennsylvania.

It was an empire at war, then, with police and army people everywhere, and many streets blocked to make it harder to attack key buildings.
Regardless, the flowers were nice.

JL had a daylong seminar (say no more) and I had a date with the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. I will present a few of my 228 photos taken there.

Robert Goddard built the first liquid-fueled rockets, starting in 1926. In 1929 he launched the first science payload, a barometer and a camera. This detail is from one of his last rockets, in 1941. He worked out most of the concepts for steering, stabilizing, and recovering rockets. He died 10 Aug 1945, the day after the US dropped the second nuclear weapon on Japan.

This is the Bell X-1, the first aircraft to surpass the speed of sound and survive. The aircraft is rocket-powered, and was dropped out of the bomb bay of a Boeing B-29 on 14 Oct 1947, when she first flew faster than sound.

Sputnik has to be respected. No one dreamed the Russians could do it. They did not let that stop them. On 4 Oct 1957, the space age began.

Views of the NASA spacecraft named Ranger which visited the Moon in 1964 and 1965. When I say visited, I mean like the first car I owned "visited" the guardrail on the QEW one late winter day. Unlike my Toyota, the Ranger was designed to return photographs by radio right up until the moment of impact.

The Surveyor spacecraft made landings on the moon from 1966 to 1968 to determine if the surface would be safe for astronauts to land and travel on.

Speaking of Moon landings, the trip there for humans started with a 110.6 m rocket called the Saturn V. This is one of the five F-1 rocket engines on the Saturn V's first stage. Together the engines produced enough thrust to lift more than 3.5 million kilograms. I feel quite small standing in front of it.

Jump forward to the best part, actually walking around on the Moon. The Lunar Excursion Module or LEM in these photos is the real article, a lunar lander that was to be used in a test flight that never happened.

This is Viking 1. No, wait, Viking 1 is on Mars. This is a "proof test article" that bears a strong resemblance to the Viking landers that the US sent to Mars, which arrived there and landed in the summer and fall of 1976.

When you come home from a distant planet, it's nice to be able to get out of your spacecraft, no doubt still steaming and hissing with the heat of re-entry, as quickly as possible. This is the detail of a door from the Apollo command module used in the Skylab 4 orbital mission.

JL and me by the banks of the Potomac river.