The Museum of Flight has been holding a special exhibit this summer for the 50th anniversary of the first manned moon landing. The museum has a number of interesting Apollo exhibits as it is but these were combined with some extra items specific to Apollo 11 and its crew. The centerpiece of this was the command module, Columbia. We actually waited until near the end of the exhibit before we visited but it was well worth the trip. Columbia was in the center of the final room of the tour and you could walk all around it.
The hatch was separate from Columbia and set up so that you could look through the window of the hatch at the command module itself. This was a nice idea but, since the exhibit was so popular, getting a moment when there wasn’t someone in the shot was unrealistic. Other items on display included gloves worn on the surface by Buzz Aldrin (which had various checklists embroidered on patches attached to the gloves), a NASA jumpsuit worn by Neil but used for chores on his farm in later years and his Congressional Space Medal of Honor.
The display also included the recovered engines normally on display but with the addition of a part from one of the Apollo 11 F1 engines recovered by Jeff Bezos’s team. The local Boeing connection to the project was well represented and a lunar rover was on display to highlight this too. Even at the end of the exhibits time, there was a long line of people waiting to get in. We had an early slot which turned out to be a good thing. By the time we got out, the line had grown substantially.
The Red Arrows have conducted a North American tour this year. It commenced just after RIAT so, while I saw them there, I hoped to catch them at some point during the tour. Their closest displays were in Oregon and Vancouver and I wasn’t able to go to either sadly. They did stage through Seattle, though, so I figured I would go and see them arrive. The twelve jets showed up on a heavily overcast day. They did some flybys over the city and then a run in across Boeing Field. A pair of jets landed directly while the remaining ten flew around a little more – nine ships in formation and one getting some photos. Then it was run and and break to landing before taxiing off to parking.
