Tag: Museum of Flight

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Museum gets an intact moon rocket engine

F-1 engine
An Apollo-era F-1 rocket engine arrives on a flatbed truck. (Museum of Flight Photo)

When historic rocket engine parts from the Apollo moon missions go on display in May in Seattle, museumgoers will be able to compare them with an intact F-1 engine.

The 50-year-old, 18.5-foot-tall engine arrived at one of the Museum of Flight’s offsite facilities today after a road trip from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.

Just to be safe, museum spokesman Ted Huetter declined to say exactly where the rocket engine is being kept while it’s being prepared for display. “I think we’ll leave it as an ‘undisclosed location,’” he told GeekWire.

The intricately machined hardware will complement a set of beat-up components from the first-stage engines that powered Saturn V rockets spaceward during the Apollo 12 and Apollo 16 missions in 1969 and 1972, respectively.

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In Seattle, space sisterhood is powerful

SpaceFest panel
SpaceX’s Aarti Matthews, Blue Origin’s Erika Wagner and Vulcan Aerospace’s Cassie Lee field questions at the Museum of Flight’s SpaceFest. (GeekWire photo by Alan Boyle)

The billionaires who run Blue Origin and SpaceX – Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk – may be locked in an outer-space rivalry, but the engineers who get the job done say they’re rooting for each other.

Erika Wagner, Blue Origin’s business development manager, says engineers at the company’s headquarters in Kent, Wash., cheer every time they see SpaceX launch and land a rocket. And Aarti Matthews, a mission manager at SpaceX in the Los Angeles area, says the feeling is mutual.

“We’re really excited for each other, because we’re changing the industry together,” Matthews said last weekend at the Museum of Flight’s annual SpaceFest gathering in Seattle.

One of those changes is the growing prominence of women in the commercial space industry. That was reflected in the title of this year’s SpaceFest: “Ladies Who Launch.”

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Get a video tour of Apollo moon rocket artifacts

It’s been almost a year since Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos unveiled pieces of the Saturn V rocket engines that propelled Apollo’s astronauts to the moon – and now you can watch a video guide to the goodies, courtesy of Seattle’s Museum of Flight (and GeekWire).

Next spring, the decades-old artifacts will be among the highlights of a remodeled exhibit focusing on the golden age of spaceflight, which reached its climax with the Apollo moon missions.

But for now, they’re sitting in one of the museum’s secure storage areas, ready to be installed once the exhibit space is ready.

After each Saturn V launch, the rocket’s first stage – including its 19-foot-tall F-1 engines – fell into the Atlantic Ocean while the rest of the spacecraft powered onward. If anyone had been there to see the first stage’s plunge, it wouldn’t have been a pretty sight.

“When hot engines hit cold seawater, often the engines just exploded,” said Geoff Nunn, the Museum of Flight’s adjunct curator for space history (and your guide for the video tour).

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What it’s like to take a virtual walk on Mars

Virtual walk on Mars
Aerospace and science editor Alan Boyle, explores NASA’s Curiosity rover and its surroundings on Mars in virtual reality at Seattle’s Museum of Flight. (GeekWire photo by Kevin Lisota)

I’ve been to Mars to kick the tires on NASA’s Curiosity rover – and you can take that trip as well.

Not in reality, of course, but in virtual reality: The tours of Curiosity’s surroundings near Mount Sharp are being provided courtesy of Seattle’s Museum of Flight during this weekend’s SpaceFest gathering.

There’s a whole program of activities, built on the theme of “Ladies Who Launch.” Speakers include Nathalia Holt, the author of “Rise of the Rocket Girls”; South Korean astronaut Soyeon Yi; women from Boeing, Vulcan Aerospace, SpaceX, Planetary Resources and Blue Origin; and Amy Shira Teitel, who’s the author of “Breaking the Chains of Gravity” and the blogger behind Vintage Space.

The virtual reality tours are sure to be a hot ticket as well. In cooperation with Valve, the VR/gaming company based in Bellevue, Wash., the museum made the Mars experience available during last year’s SpaceFest. Hundreds took turns wearing an HTC Vive headset and pacing carefully around a virtual Red Planet.

“We put 300 people on Mars before NASA did,” exhibit designer Peder Nelson joked.

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Where will Jeff Bezos put space colonists?

O'Neill colony
This artist’s conception from the 1970s shows the interior of an O’Neill cylinder. (Credit: NASA)

SpaceX’s Elon Musk wants to settle humans on Mars. Others talk about a Moon Village. But Seattle billionaire Jeff Bezos has a different kind of off-Earth home in mind when he talks about having millions of people living and working in space.

His long-range vision focuses on a decades-old concept for huge artificial habitats that are best known today as O’Neill cylinders.

The concept was laid out in 1976 in a classic book by physicist Gerard O’Neill, titled “The High Frontier.” The idea is to create cylinder-shaped structures in outer space, and give them enough of a spin that residents on the inner surface of the cylinder could live their lives in Earth-style gravity. The habitat’s interior would be illuminated either by reflected sunlight or sunlike artificial light.

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Apollo 11 spaceship slated to stop by Seattle

Apollo 11 command module
The Apollo 11 command module, shown here at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., is due to go on a road trip in 2019. (Credit: Smithsonian Institution / NASM)

The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum is laying the groundwork for a 50th-anniversary traveling exhibit featuring Apollo 11 space hardware, including the moon mission’s command module – and Seattle’s Museum of Flight could be a prime stop.

The 2019 road show is the Smithsonian’s preferred solution to an awkward problem: what to do with artifacts from the historic 1969 moon landing while a section of the museum in Washington, D.C., is being renovated.

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The inside story behind Jeff Bezos’ Star Trek cameo

Lydia Wilson and Jeff Bezos
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos plays a Starfleet official (at right) who assists a rescued spacefarer (played by Lydia Wilson, at left). Credit: Justin Lin via Twitter

When “Star Trek Beyond” comes out on DVD next week, you can freeze-frame on the big-name cameo appearance that zipped past so quickly in the theaters: Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ moment as an alien Starfleet official.

If you missed recognizing him, don’t feel bad. Even Bezos acknowledges that it was a quickie, and the fact that he’s loaded up with face prosthetics doesn’t help.

“You will have to watch very carefully. Do not blink. You will miss me,” he said during Oct. 22’s Pathfinder Awards banquet at Seattle’s Museum of Flight. Bezos was one of the honorees, along with airplane restorer Addison Pemberton.

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Jeff Bezos shares big ideas at Museum of Flight

Jeff Bezos
Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos shows off a tortoise cufflink during the Pathfinder Awards banquet at Seattle’s Museum of Flight. The tortoise symbolizes the approach Bezos takes with his Blue Origin space venture. “We believe slow is smooth, and smooth is fast,” he says. (Credit: Tania Shepard / Azzura Photography)

Someday, you’ll be printing out a landing pad to guide an Amazon drone to its delivery, or maybe taking a suborbital space trip on a Blue Origin rocket ship, or marveling over the mechanism of a clock designed to run for 10,000 years.

Such were the visions laid out by Amazon’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, on Oct. 22 as he received one of this year’s Pathfinder Awards from the Museum of Flight.

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Museum of Flight offers VR tours inside planes

Image: VR tour at Museum of Flight
Visitors to Seattle’s Museum of Flight can use smartphones equipped with VR glasses to look into the interior of historic airplanes. (Credit: Microsoft via YouTube)

It’s not easy to crawl through the guts of a World War II bomber, but a new virtual reality project from Microsoft and Seattle’s Museum of Flight turns it into a snap on a screen.

The Aviation Pavilion Virtual Tour is actually a series of VR tours, highlighting interior views of planes ranging from the B-17F Flying Fortress and the B-29 Superfortress to Boeing’s 737 and 747 jets.

“For the first time, visitors – both on site as well as remotely – will be able to ‘step inside’ the cockpits and interiors of these carefully preserved artifacts through high-fidelity 360-degree virtual tours,” the museum says.

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Jet gets dropped off at museum … literally!

Blue Angels jet unloaded
A Blue Angels F/A-18 Hornet jet is raised up from a flatbed truck using a crane at the Museum of Flight. (GeekWire photo by Alan Boyle)

The latest addition to the Museum of Flight’s airplane collection, a Blue Angels F/A-18 Hornet jet, landed in Seattle today with the aid of a three-story-high crane.

The No. 2 jet, which is on permanent loan from the National Naval Air Museum in Pensacola, Fla., didn’t make the trip the way it did last year, by air. Instead, it was driven to Jet City on the back of a flatbed truck, over the course of six days.

The truck driver, Buddy Chapman of Blossom, Texas, said the sight caused a traffic jam wherever he stopped.

“You’d stop in the littlest town in Wyoming, and you wouldn’t be there but five minutes and you’d have 30 people around it,” he told GeekWire.

While aviation buffs and their kids watched, the truck pulled into a museum parking lot behind the Charles Simonyi Space Gallery, accompanied by a police escort. Sections of the detached wings were offloaded using a forklift, and then the giant crane pulled in to lift the jet off the back of a truck and set it back down.

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