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 salmon head to spawn in phases with the three different breeds coming at slightly different times. They head through the ladder at the locks in Ballard in the fall but, before they head into Lake Washington, they pause in the approach area. The transition from salt water to fresh is something that they have to adjust to and the area just by the locks where the fresh water is spilling out provides a good place for them to get adjusted. They can stay for a couple of weeks or more. The result was that we saw a lot of salmon swimming around in the waters by the dam. This was not a risk free occupation as shall be covered in a future post.
