First, Happy Birthday Dad! We hope your day is great!
We spent the day at the Cosmosphere (http://cosmo.org/).
Who knew that this amazing museum was in the middle of Kansas? The things we saw today made me stop and think that I was truly looking at pieces of history. In addition to the Space Museum, the Cosmosphere has a Planetarium, Dome Theater, and Dr. Goddard’s Lab where they “blow stuff up” (or give a lesson about rockets). Also, a crew from the television show “Mysteries at the Museum” was filming there today. Laura was beyond excited about that because she loves that show! We talked to the two-person crew for a little bit as we were leaving the Cosmosphere. What a fun day!
We started the day at the museum portion of the Cosmosphere. Most people do not realize that if it were not for Nazi Germany, the United States might never have gone to the moon. The museum began with a display about the development of the rockets that were the precursor to the Saturn V rockets used in the Apollo space program. The story is both scary and sad, but looking at one of the real rockets made me actually speechless.
After wandering through the German portion of the museum and then into the Cold War portion, it really starts to come together for you that there was a space race. I am not old enough to have lived through most of it, but when you see the stories and the artifacts, it hits you. This is a real Soviet Sputnik satellite. It never flew in space, but it is one of the actual satellites.
We spent so much time in the first two portions of the museum, that we had to leave it to go to our scheduled Dome Theater show where we saw “Extreme Weather,” a National Geographic documentary on how weather shapes the environment on Earth. We followed that show with a trip to Dr. Goddard’s Lab where we all enjoyed watching the different science experiments. Then, it was on to a fast snack in the food court before our Planetarium show. We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering through the rest of the museum. I especially loved the Apollo portion of the museum. This is a real Apollo Lunar Module. It was used in training.
Next was a moon rock from the actual Apollo 11 landing. I could have looked at it all afternoon. This rock was once on the moon. The Moon. The smooth surface is because it was sliced into pieces for analysis. My mind was blown that I was looking at an actual moon rock.
The part of the museum that really made me speechless was the actual Apollo 13 Command Module – the Odyssey. The museum restored the Odyssey from 1995 to 1997 by finding and properly placing the 80,000 components that were housed in different storage facilities across the United States. Everyone has heard the stories or seen the movie, but when you look at the actual Odyssey and see the heat shield, it is amazing. Simply amazing.
We spent the rest of the day eating a nice dinner and playing in the hotel pool. We had originally planned to drive back to Kansas City tonight, but Andy discovered that there is a salt mine museum in Hutchinson also. Off to that tomorrow!