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Old 10-11-2017, 01:21 AM
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blackshire blackshire is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: Fairbanks, Alaska
Posts: 6,507
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Quote:
Originally Posted by tbzep
I checked my email around 7:00 this morning and you hadn't replied yet. I only took a couple photos of those two because we were trying to get through the museum/rocket park in time to eat a bite and make the 12:30 bus tour. If I had thought to check the forum again after the tour and Imax movie I'd have run back out to the rocket park for a bunch of detail shots. I'll get the few I have up and post a link for you in the next night or two as soon as I figure out where to host such large files. They are 24mp images, but I'm afraid I just took quick shots and didn't do anything for composition or detail.

For those like me that haven't been to Huntsville in decades, there have been some changes. The bus tour now stops and lets you get out and up close and personal with the Redstone test stand. We just drove by it the last time I did the bus tour. The other two stops included the ISS Payload Ops Center and the Marshall propulsion research hub which had a real SRB sitting outside that flew on the first shuttle launch. When I was a kid we got off the bus at the "Flat Floor" building (think of the perfect supersized air hockey floor, but in reverse) which is still in use, and the Neutral Buoyancy Simulator, which has now been decommissioned. The tour guide was very knowledgeable, well beyond the rehearsed stuff. He welcomed questions and he got only one question he couldn't answere and he admitted he didn't know instead of BS'ing regarding a question asked if all engines were test fired before being flown on a mission.

Most of the main museum stuff and quite a bit of the stuff from the rocket park was missing, which really upset me considering the trip was for my daughter. I was relieved that nearly all of it had been restored and put in the big Saturn V building. The big Saturn looked wonderful. It was pitiful looking the last time I saw it outside. Of course, the payload (LEM shroud, SM and LEM) were all fake and the big solid motor portion of the escape tower was way too short. The CM was painted up like a Little Joe II test round. The Titan missile that was laying by the Saturn outside is gone, hopefully to get refurbished and displayed. The NERVA engine was gone, but there was one at the last stop of the bus tour, possibly the same one. I didn't see the old X-15 mockup either.

The SR-71 has been painted and now looks like a plastic model. That's one bird that looked better in its original old flat paint (burned paint?), but I understand it had to be done to preserve it. Too bad it couldn't have been put inside from day one to preserve the real finish.

I remember several interstage sections being used as buildings last time, but I only noticed one of them today. I started searching and found that they had a fire in one a couple years ago. The G-Force Accelerator ride was closed and was only surrounded by a 3 ft fence. Last time I was there it was completely hidden from view by a high wall and was running. The LEM mockup located in the rocket park's gold paint has turned orange. They have a CH-47 Chinook in the area that the 2nd stage of the Saturn V formerly occupied, which seems odd, but they had a lot of Army stuff displayed inside the museum area to tie in with it, including a rock climbing wall. We know how closely related a rock climbing wall is to the MSFC and NASA missions.
Maybe the rock climbing wall was a training facility left over from the cancelled Apollo mission where the LEM surface crew would have gone down into the crater Tycho... :-)
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Black Shire--Draft horse in human form, model rocketeer, occasional mystic, and writer, see:
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