Timberwalkers Visits Discovery

I grew up near the dawn of the era of human space flight. As a child I read about Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard and John Glenn. I joined the model rocket club and we launched our creations from the field behind the  school. I watched Star Trek reruns with my friend Harold and saw Star Wars and Star Trek in the theater with my dad when they were first released. I still have a set of prints with photos from the Apollo 15 mission that Dad ordered for me directly from NASA. 

The Space Shuttle program, which started in 1972 and first flew during my Junior High years, was a fascinating development in space exploration and I followed it closely. I tuned in to live coverage of launches and landings. I reveled in the heroic repair mission of the Hubble Space Telescope. I studied the complex processes and mechanisms it used. I was saddened by the loss of 14 heroes in the Challenger and Colombia tragedies.

The Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center, located adjacent to Dulles Airport, is an annex to the Smithsonian's main National Air and Space Museum on the National Mall. The retired Space Shuttle Discovery arrived there in 2012 and sometime thereafter got added to my bucket list. That item got checked off last week.

I arrived about 20 minutes before opening, time enough to admire and photograph the stunning architecture of the facility and then stand at the door, faking patience, until the door opened. 

I was first through the door on that weekday morning and made a bee line for the gallery housing the Shuttle. The nose of the ship is pointed toward the gallery entrance, visible long before you enter, and my camera began snapping before I crossed the threshold. 

I was too absorbed in the massive and beautiful machine to mark the time, but I suspect that for about 30 minutes I was the sole visitor in the Shuttle gallery. For 30 minutes, at a museum visited by a million people each year, I had Discovery to myself. 

I snapped a few photos.

I studied the heat dissipating tiles; 

the maneuvering thrusters;

the payload bay door hinges;

and the massive rocket engines that launched it into space. 

I thought of the thousands of women and men who lent a hand to the design, construction, maintenance, management and flight of this remarkable machine. 

I thought of my dad, a pilot, and how much he would have enjoyed seeing this with me. Here he is, flying his aircraft.

I got choked up a time or two.

I met a fellow visitor, a lovely man named Brian, from Iowa but who has mostly lived abroad and realized he has seen more of other countries than his own and is working to rectify that. He took my picture in front of the Shuttle. 

The museum is large, housing hundreds of other fascinating aircraft and artifacts including a Concorde and an SR-71 Blackbird. I strolled through the other galleries but to be honest, most of the other machines garnered only a glance. 

I did stop to admire and read the story about this unassuming model of the door to the Apollo capsule, created by a team led by Adam Savage and chronicled on his YouTube channel. 

The experience has me thinking more about my bucket list. It's not written down and it's not very ambitious. It includes things like camp with Kate, visit public gardens, hike around Sheryl and Jody's property, tour my nephew's home in the mountains, eat more meals at Donna's table, kayak at Merchants Millpond, and live in a house in the woods with my sweetie. That last one gets crossed off daily, for which I am deeply grateful. 

One item that was not on my list was visiting Great Falls National Park, also  near Washington, D.C. We practically stumbled upon in it during our time in the area and had the great fortune of adding it to the list and crossing it off on the same day. It's spectacular and if you live in the Southeast, I recommend it for your own. 

My list does not include the Grand Canyon, or a trip to the Irish countryside, or seeing whales in Alaska. Those opportunities may arise and if they do I will embrace them. But they may not and I guess I don't want the disappointment of dreams unrealized, especially when there is so much beauty still to discover here close to home in and near North Carolina. 

But on a Tuesday morning in October I spent time with one of the most extraordinary machines built in my lifetime, a machine that has awed and inspired me for decades, and it was glorious.