Spaceflight Academy!

This week's volunteer shift at the Museum of Flight was quite interesting.  I spent the shift over in the Space Gallery where I watched the final push for installation of the new Spaceflight Academy. 

First, as I arrived, I caught this interesting view of the newly delivered Boeing 787 (# 3).

I had been a bit annoyed when I heard the Christmas tree was already up.  It was still a week before Thanksgiving.  However, the previous evening, at the volunteer meeting, it was explained that the Museum will have several groups hosting their holiday parties, starting right after Thanksgiving so the tree needed to be up early.  They are also dependent upon the schedule of the volunteer group that does the set up.  This tree celebrates the 50th Anniversary of the Museum of Flight!

While watching the Spaceflight Academy final build, I met Alfred.  He's a retired Boeing engineer.  And he built the fuel tanks for the model of the Space Shuttle!  He said he began the build nearly 2 years ago, in December 2012.

He was there to watch the installation of the tanks.  The model of the shuttle was built by AeroJet Rockadyne and donated to the Museum.   I waited as long as I could.  Next week, my shift falls on Thanksgiving and the Museum of closed.  So it's likely I won't be there again until early December.  I'll have more photos then.


Dieter is a Museum docent and a real Rocket Scientist.  He is an engineer for Aerojet Rockadyne of Redmond.  He presented at the Museum's Spacefest on the rockets built for NASA Mars missions. In the second photo, he's posed holding a plastic model of one of the engines. 

 

I meet such interesting and accomplished people at the Museum!  There were several astronauts there for Spacefest but, this time, I didn't meet any of them. 


All the photos are here.

Norwescon

I'm back from 4 days at Norwescon.  Wanda drove up from Portland to go with me and we shared a room.  We got back to my home Sunday afternoon. 

I'm still catching up on 4 days with no internet!  The hotel offered free wifi but the bandwidth was so poor it took more than 5 minutes to connect to anything so I gave up on that Thursday night!

I don't have so many photos this year. My Canon G12 was in for repair. These were taken with the Nexus 5, which is not as good or as easily used camera. So I did not take as many photos.  What I did take are all here.


One of my first ever selfies; this one is with Wanda as we left for the con.  I'm on the left.

I discovered the Seattle Geekly podcast is back!  They stopped doing it in 2011 so I didn't follow their website anymore.  They had to register a new domain as someone squatted on their old one, which had expired.

I attended 4 different art panels.  Two were discussions and two were figure drawing sessions with costumed models, some of whom I knew!

One of the most interesting panels was Behind the Scenes at Kennedy Space Center presented by Hugo-winning SF writer, David D. Levine.  A few facts I noted down from his slide show and talk.  He got to have a very up close tour and then watched a launch.  Water is sprayed on the launch pad during a launch.  It's not for the flames but to deaden the sound.  The sound of the engines alone can damage the rocket!  He said, "from 100 feet away the sound will kill you; from 500 feet away the flames will kill you; from 1000 feet away the alligators will kill you"  (Kennedy Space Center is also a nature preserve).  There are 2 of the huge crawlers which transport a rocket from the build location to the launch pad.  They are named Hanz and Franz.  They get 55 gallons to the mile.

My hall costume for Friday was "Momma Grimm".  It's a version of what Nick's mother wears on the TV show Grimm.  Wolf said it was too obscure and he was right.  I wasn't allowed to carry the crossbow due to weapons policy at the con.  I thought that would help people recognize what I was supposed to be.  Turns out, those people who asked had never even seen Grimm, so they had no reference.  These were taken on the balcony of our room by my friend Bethany....

I made a copy of the Wesen reference book from images I found on the web.

















The Author Guest of Honor for Norwescon 38 in 2015 is George R.R. Martin, of Game of Thrones fame.  He was invited in 2012 and replied (paraphrasing what we were told)" Can't do it this year.  Not in 2013, nor 2014. How's 2015?"  So there it is.