Air and Space: a place for wonder

It was slow season at Washington, D.C.’s Smithsonian Air and Space Museum last week as volunteer guide Pat Nagel ushered her tour group to a spacesuit worn by an astronaut.

The younger, smaller members of the group pressed their noses to the glass. “That dark material on the suit is moon dust,” Nagel said.

Moon dust.

The young faces peered up at Nagel in disbelief. Nagel continued the (free) one-hour tour, taking the group from the very dawn of flight with the original plane built by the Wright brothers in 1903 up to the latest pictures from Mars, only 24 hours old.

The Smithsonian is the most-visited museum in the world, Nagel said. It is no wonder. It is staggering to think so many historic exhibits could be housed in one place.

The first stop is the Spirit of St. Louis, flown by Charles Lindbergh from New York to Paris on a single engine in 33.5 hours. There were no front windows on the plane and the pilot navigated by a periscope contraption to win $25,000 offered for the trans-oceanic flight.

Right next to the Spirit is the Bell X1, the first plane to break the sound barrier, then the X-15, which flew at six times the speed of sound.

The surprisingly small space capsules are all there, including the Mercury Friendship piloted by John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, and the Apollo 11 spacecraft that took Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon in July 1969.

Amazingly, there are a number of Russian space vehicles, purchased by Ross Perot when the USSR encountered financial collapse.

To anyone addicted to the History Channel and World War II, the museum has an impressive amount of exhibits from that era, including the dreaded V1 and V2 rockets that rained down on England. Nagel said more people were killed during the slave labor manufacture of the volatile aircraft than were killed in bombing England.

There is a B-26 cockpit, so tiny that you wonder how the crew ever fit inside. In the World War II exhibit are the storied Spitfires, Zeros, Mustangs and Messerschmitts, so familiar from the black-and-white films on the History Channel.

The Smithsonian had so many exhibits that an addition was opened last year, the Udvar-Hazy Annex. Here, 15 miles away, are MiG 21 and F86 Sabre jets that dueled over Korean skies, the SA2 missile of the type that shot down Francis Gary Powers and his ill-fated U2, a P40 used by the Flying Tigers and some truly bizarre displays.

The oddest had to be the Seiran, a Japanese plane that could be launched from a submarine. These were designed to attack New York and Los Angeles, but the war ended before the planes were employed in combat. Allied forces did not know the Seiran existed until the factory was discovered in Japan. Somehow the plane was engineered to fold inside the submarine.

But the most dramatic exhibit is the Enola Gay, the B29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. Despite the demonstrations against the airplane by many groups, it remains one of the most popular attractions, Nagel said.

Many forget that far more people died in civilian firebombing than from the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan, she said.

The last Concorde, which flew from France to New York, is in the annex, a casualty of economics. The plane cost so much to fly above the speed of sound that tickets cost $4,000 to $6,000.

As one exhibit states, it was only 66 years, or one good lifetime, from Kitty Hawk to the moon.

Moon dust.

Amazing.

Send complaints and compliments to Emmet Meara at emmetmeara@msn.com.