Mars Rover Curiosity Landing

I don't usually indulge in frivolous posts but being a space-race nut, I had to post this and share my excitement on a marvel of engineering and rocketry. It's actually fun to listen to the excitment build among the new generation of steely-eyed Missle Men and Women counting it down. Eat THAT nay-sayers, America is still #1 in Space!

DC 2012 Part 7

The last in this series...I promise. A first time visit to DC must contain a look at the big guys home just a mere 8 miles from our hotel in Alexandria and 17 miles from downtown DC. A beautiful ride awaits you along the George Washington Memorial Parkway (Va State Highway 400) which gently winds its way along the Potomac’s western shore. In early May, the limbs of the old-growth trees were heavy with dark green leaves, which threatened to envelope the road around each curve. We sped by (posted max speed is 45 MPH!) several B&Bs and small restaurants along the way. We may have to check them out on our next trip.

Some of you may know that Mt Vernon is privately owned and not operated by the US Park Service. Mount Vernon is owned and maintained in a trust by the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association of the Union, a private, non-profit organization founded in 1853 by Ann Pamela Cunningham. The Association is the oldest national historic preservation organization in the country. They began restoration of the 500 acres along the Potomac in 1860. You see, after George and Martha had passed away, none of the kids stuck around to run the place. By the mid-1800’s the place had fallen into serious disrepair and was in fear of collapsing.

The property has a long pre-Revolution history back to the earliest settling of Virginia. George’s great-grandfather, John, bought a stake in the property in 1674. John died in 1677 and his stake transferred to his son Lawrence (Washington’s grandfather). Upon Lawrence Washington's death, he left the property to his daughter, Mildred.

In 1726, at the urging of her brother Augustine Washington (George Washington's father), Mildred sold him the Potomac River estate. Augustine purchased the land, known originally as Little Hunting Creek Plantation after the nearby Little Hunting Creek. In 1735, Augustine Washington moved his young, second family to the estate, settling into a humble farmhouse alongside Little Hunting Creek.

Augustine then recruited Washington’s older half-brother Lawrence to run the place while Augustine moved back to Fredericksburg, Virginia. Lawrence continued expanding the plantation by buying up land around them. In 1740, Lawrence received a commission in the Regular British Army, and went off to war in the Caribbean with a newly formed American Regiment.

While he was away at war (the War of Jenkins' Ear, 1739–1743), Lawrence wrote to his father from Jamaica in May 1741, that, should he survive the war, he intended to make his home in the town of Fredericksburg, Virginia. When Lawrence made it clear he was moving back to Fredericksburg, Augustine began construction of a modest farmhouse on the bluff where Mt Vernon is today. When Lawrence learned this, he wrote his father instructing him to call the new home "Mount Vernon" in honor of Captain Lawrence Washington's commanding officer, Vice Admiral Edward Vernon.

Lawrence returned from the war, buried Augustine in 1743 and Lawrence did the first expansion of the farmhouse on the bluff. Lawrence died in 1752 and a portion of the estate fell to his younger half-brother, George. Two major expansions of the main house occur under Washington doubling the size each time to the neoclassical Georgian architectural style we see today.

Although tobacco was the main cash crop in the south, by 1766, Washington had completely ended tobacco growing at Mount Vernon, instead raising wheat, corn, and other grains. Besides hemp and flax, he experimented with 60 other crops. Washington built a gristmill, which produced cornmeal and flour for export and ground neighbors' grain as well. He similarly sold the services of the estate's looms and blacksmith, and built a small fishing fleet that let Mount Vernon export fish. Back in 1797, Washington was one of the original distillers of whiskey in America. After the war and during his Presidency, he concentrated on the grounds improving the gardens and expanding the farming operation. Some of those gardens have been beautifully restored.

Because other crops were much less labor-intensive, than tobacco, Washington refused to break up slave families and so the estate always had too many slaves. To reduce his dependence on slave labor he began hiring skilled indentured servants (and the difference is?) from Europe to train them for service on and off the estate.

A little deceiving from the outside, the iconic home sits at the center of several support buildings containing the kitchen, slave quarters, smokehouse, coach house and stables. It is a two floor (three if you count the Cupola at the top) wood home consisting of 21 rooms (if you count the basement spaces) and approximately 12,000 sq. feet.

Washington led by example, striving to make Mount Vernon a model of new, science-based agriculture, in order to benefit other farmers. He experimented with crops and fertilizers and continually sought the best innovations. It’s important to remember the guy was a businessman; he took advantage of the opportunities provided by his wealth and position, eventually running flourishing fisheries, a gristmill, and the largest distillery in the country. His distillery was also restored and produces up to 5,000 gallons of whiskey annually, for sale only at the Mount Vernon gift shop.

Arriving at Mount Vernon is a bit of a surprise. As “Disneyland” as an historic landmark can be. Thousands of people make the trek and all must follow one of two distinct paths throughout the estate. You can just walk the estate on your own or with one of those cool “self guided tour” audio players (you’re even encouraged to bring your dog on a leash). Then there is the house tour. The house tour consists of staging at your appointed time on the dirt driveway for a “foot shuffle” tour with a guide. These groups wend their way (thus the sounds of “shuffling of feet”)  through the first and second floors of the main house with brief glimpses of the bedrooms and parlors where chiefs of state and the famous who chased after them visited, dined and slept. The view from the back porch from the Windsor chairs overlooking the Potomac is stunning.

You can stand at the foot of the bed where Washington died in 1799. Washington had ridden his rounds around the estate on a cold and wet December 12^th ,1799 and failed to sufficiently dry out and warm himself. He complained of difficulty breathing and all evidence points to a condition called  Eppiglottitis. Doctors were called but were unable to treat him. He died December 14^th at the age of 67 most likely by asphyxiation.

A burial chamber was constructed on the estate and Washington was buried there. Although Congress had authorized a marble monument in the United States Capitol for his body, in December 1800, the House passed an appropriations bill for $200,000 to build the mausoleum, which was to be a pyramid that had a base 100 feet square. There was too much opposition and it was never built.

In 1831, for the centennial of his birth, a second tomb was constructed to receive his remains. Interestingly, that same year, an unsuccessful attempt was made to steal the body of Washington. His remains were moved on October 7, 1837 to the new tomb constructed at Mount Vernon. After the ceremony, the inner vault's door was closed and the key was thrown into the Potomac (you can’t make this stuff up).

That's George on the left

I liked Mount Vernon. I walked away with a couple of things. The first was the reverence for a great man and his legacy. The home and especially the museum really take you back to the times of Washington and some perspective on how a relatively small group of people created a new country and way of life for its citizens. The other was, hey...I saw where Washington actually slept.

There is a food court of fast foods but we chose the Mount Vernon Inn restaurant. They have an eclectic menu of traditional favorites from the period with a few modern items. The food was great.

Having hit the bulk of our bucket list of places to visit in DC, we made our way back to our hotel for our last night in Alexandria. We signed up for a  Ghost Tour  of old Alexandria so we caught dinner at The Wharf on King Street. Great seafood and steak place.

From there we walked to the Alexandria Wharf, a place called The Torpedo Factory  . The area was the site of a Naval Armory, which made torpedoes for the military from 1918 until the late 60s. It then turned into a storage warehouse for the Smithsonian until purchased by the City of Alexandria. It was opened as a mixed-use development in 1983.

The Ghost Tour was somewhat lame but we did get to see a couple of significant historic spots. Gadsby’s Tavern  has its roots in early American history as a gathering place for Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary icons. From George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe even Thomas Jefferson was feted in 1801 with a banquet in the ballroom of the Tavern. President Andrew Jackson spent the first night of his presidency at the tavern; he sneaked out through a window of the White House and walked the six miles to Alexandria to avoid a particularly raucous inaugural party. The Marquis de La Fayette quaffed a few beers there as well (or was it white wine).

The other was the townhouse Washington owned and stayed at while in town for business. There is a neat little marker on the wall, which showed that Washington had paid his Fireman’s Tax. If you had a fire, this would alert the firemen you had paid your tax and would allow them to put out your fire. Tough town to live in.

The following morning, having exhausted our stay, we packed our booty and made our way downstairs. When we loaded up the rental for the airport, our poor Indian (red dot) valet tried valiantly to power lift her suitcase into the trunk to no avail. I had to jump in and lift before Sanja blew out a disk. When we left, to check the weight of our (well….her) bags, I loaded them on our bathroom scale and noted her big bag was about 40 pounds. When we got to the rental return, on my first try to extricate her bag from the trunk, I too considered making a Chiropractor appointment on our return home.

Interestingly, when I hoisted her bag onto the scale at Reagan National, it tipped the scale at 61 pounds. Recalling the new American Airlines rules, I pulled out my wallet to pay the overage (50-pound max). The very nice ticket agent just looked at me with a knowing nod and accepted the bags. Well, American was in Chapter 11 so maybe they were cutting us some slack so we would come back some day.

DC 2012 Part 6

To round out our (my) Smithsonian Air and Space experience, we traveled to Chantilly, Virginia. Chantilly is the long time home of Washington Dulles International Airport and the new home of the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center which was opened in 2003 to house much of the overflow of historic aircraft that had been piling up in warehouses and hangars all over the place.

Udvar-Hazy is the leading donor to the National Air and Space Museum Capital Campaign. In October 1999, Udvar-Hazy donated $60 million to the National Air and Space Museum. The entire gift, the single largest donation in the 153-year history of the Smithsonian, was made to go toward construction of the Udvar-Hazy Center scheduled to open in December 2003 on the centennial of the Wright brothers' flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C.

The structure is 2 1/2 football fields long and 10 stories high, and is the home to more than 300 aircraft and spacecraft, including the space shuttle Discovery. Along with state-of-the-art storage and restoration facilities, the center features educational facilities, an archival resource center, a large-format theater, museum stores and restaurants, and an observation tower from which visitors can watch aircraft arriving and departing from nearby Washington Dulles International Airport.

Folks, this thing is huge. Standing on one end of the main display area, it seems to follow the curvature of the Earth. You can’t see the other end until you climb up the elevated walkway, which runs the entire length of the two hangars. Way cool feature. It gets you up about two stories and is handicap accessible so you can look down onto the aircraft, some at eye level. Then there’s all the aircraft hanging from the ceiling in flight configuration as though they were swooping and flying overhead.

There are the treasures of flight like the SR-71 Blackbird, the original Boeing 367-80, which became the commercial 707 passenger airliner, the Concorde is here and the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the first nuclear weapon in wartime.

But the big one everybody was there to see was the Space Shuttle Discovery. It sits proudly and center stage among all the space exhibits in the James McDonnell Space Hangar. Enterprise used to be there but when they retired all the shuttles, it was decided that Discovery would replace it. Discovery had flown the most number of missions (39), put up the Hubble Space Telescope, did the bulk of the heavy lifting to put the International Space Station together and put John Glenn (77) back into space to do research.

For those who didn't know how your tax dollars were being spent, Senator Glenn conducted a series of experiments sponsored by NASA and the National Institute on Aging during the STS-95 mission. The investigations gathered information, which may provide a model system to help scientists interested in understanding aging. Some of these similarities include bone and muscle loss, balance disorders and sleep disturbances. Data provided from Glenn during this mission was compared to data obtained from Glenn's Friendship 7 orbital mission in 1962 (yeah…right, what a boondoggle).

A note about naming of the shuttles. Enterprise, designated OV(Orbital Vehicle)-101, was originally planned to be named Constitution. A letter-writing campaign by Trekkies to President Gerald Ford asked that the orbiter be named after the Starship Enterprise, featured on the television show Star Trek. Ford never actually acknowledged the campaign but liked the idea and NASA made the change.

Enterprise was not a spaceflight-worthy ship. It was designed to only fly test flights within the atmosphere. It did not have the famous thermal tiles to keep it from burning up on re-entry. It was a test platform for the hair-raising final 30 minutes of unpowered gliding back to landing sites at Kennedy Space Center and Edwards Air Force Base in California and to test the fit of the spacecraft to the shuttle booster on the pad.

The other shuttles were named after famous Naval exploration ships. Columbia was a U.S. Naval Frigate that circumnavigated the globe in 1836, Challenger explored the Atlantic and Pacific for four years beginning in 1872,  Discovery was a British ship that Henry Hudson used to explore Hudson Bay. It is also the name of a ship James Cook used on his final major voyage from 1776 to 1779. Atlantis was a research vessel used by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (the folks that brought you the Titanic) between 1930 and 1966. Endeavor is named after another British ship James Cook sailed to the South Pacific in 1768 to document Venus passing between the Earth and the Sun. Ok…kind of boring but sometimes history is just that.

The tuxedo-like attire for the shuttle contains the black tiles (24,000 mostly custom cut to a particular location!) which can sustain up to 3000 degrees of re-entry heat and the white areas are primarily Flexible Insulation Blankets (FIB), a quilted, flexible blanket-like surface insulation used where re-entry temperature is below 649 °C (1,200 °F). The leading wing edges and nose section contain reinforced carbon-carbon panels used where re-entry temperature exceeds 1,260 °C (2,300 °F). This was the stuff that was breached on Columbia by the infamous foam insulation chunk off of the fuel tank during launch causing that disaster.

The space shuttle itself comprises a number of different elements: the orbiter, which holds the astronauts and mission payload; the space shuttle main engines; the external fuel tank; and the solid rocket boosters. The shuttle is assembled from more than 2.5 million parts, 230 miles of wire, 1,060 valves, and 1,440 circuit breakers. Weighing approximately 4.5 million pounds at launch, the Space Shuttle accelerates to an orbital velocity of 17,500 miles per hour—25 times faster than the speed of sound—in just over eight minutes. This all conceived in the 70’s, built in the 80’s (hey…remember, no cell phones or even laptops back then) and flew pretty successfully for 30 years. Not bad.

I have to say…when you watch the flights on TV you never get the size or scope of things. My 50 inch Plasma cannot do this thing justice. When you’re in the room, it’s this giant delta winged monster that rises up from the nose wheel and dominates the room. Interestingly, it’s smaller than the 747 that carried it back and forth from coast-to-coast, but maybe it’s the size of its contribution to space exploration and place in history as the most complex piece of machinery ever built by man.

DC 2012 Part 5

On our third foray into DC, we headed for Ford’s Theater. In 1861 theatre manager John T. Ford leased out the former First Baptist Church on Tenth Street to create Ford’s Theatre. It became a popular stage for theatrical and musical productions. On April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln visited Ford’s for his twelfth time for a performance of “Our American Cousin”. At this performance, Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln died the next morning in the Petersen House, a boarding house located across the street. It remained unused for 100 years.



Petersen Boarding House

Ford’s Theatre officially reopened in 1968 as a national historic site and working theatre. It is operated through a public-private partnership between Ford’s Theatre Society and the National Park Service. Because it is managed by the National Park Service, it, like all other tax payer supported facilities in DC, is free to enter. But that is the rub.

Because the basic walk-in tour is free, everybody and his grandmother makes the pilgrimmage and the crowds that form in front of Ford’s is staggering. The rather anemic street in front of the theater is choked with tour busses which envelope the waiting tourists queued up on the sidewalk in wave after wave of diesel fumes. Little known factoid, there are only a finite number of tickets they issue per day so get there early so you can get in.

This is true of other popular DC museums like the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. The BEP is only one of two places in America that actually prints our paper money (the other is here in Fort Worth) and is one of the most popular stops for visitors coming to DC. It was peak season hours while we were there (March 26th through August 24th) and tours run every 15 minutes from 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Off peak they close at 3 p.m. You literally have to line-up for tickets at a booth on 14th Street at the break of dawn to get in before the tickets run out. Oh yeah, they’re closed on weekends.

The basic Ford’s Theater tour allows you to walk through a basement museum with all kinds of great memorabilia from the period of the Civil War (TWONA) and some of the events surrounding Lincoln’s life and Presidency. Word to the wise…bring a good low-light camera (I did not). Flash is allowed, but most of the stuff is under glass and you’ll get bad pictures (I know).

Lincoln's blood on the pillow

Then you’re allowed upstairs to the theater and are free to wander around the main seating area and can take all the photos you want. There are other more detailed tours you can buy which give you a tour guide to walk you around but we just walked around and listened to the tour guides as they spoke to their groups. Your ticket also gets you a walk-thru of the Petersen House across the street where you can peer into the room where Lincoln spent his last hours.

Many experts today suggest the poking and prodding of the injury site by doctors most likely dislodged a blood clot which had allowed pressure to build and, relieving that pressure, got the President breathing again. One “physician” actually stuck his finger in the hole to locate the .44 cal bullet (on display at the National Museum of Health and Medicine) still lodged inside the President’s head. And the rocking chair he was sitting in at Ford's is at the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan...who knew. All their efforts failed, he continued to bleed out and Lincoln died in the tiny room aslant the small bed unable to support his full 6 foot 4 inch frame about nine hours later.

Within days of the assassination, the United States Government appropriated the theatre, with Congress paying Ford $100,000 in compensation, and an order was issued forever prohibiting its use as a place of public amusement. Between 1866 and 1887, the theatre was taken over by the U.S. military and served as a facility for the War Department. The building was used as a government warehouse until 1911. The restoration of Ford's Theatre was brought about by a bill passed in 1955 to prepare an engineering study for the reconstruction of the building. In 1964 Congress approved funds for its restoration, which began that year and was completed in 1968.

Ford’s is open from 9 am to 5 pm selling out tickets sometimes by 2 or 3 pm. As a working theatre, they’re sometimes closed for rehearsals and performances, check the website when you know you’ll be in town.

The theatre is very majestic. The 19^th century style and construction is very evident and a lot of effort was to bring it to it’s original look at the time of Lincoln’s death.

Trivia alert.... five flags surrounded Lincoln's box in Ford's Theatre, three American flags and two U.S. Treasury Guard flags. The flag Booth tripped over was a Regimental flag of the Treasury Guard calling out "Sic semper tyrannis" (Latin phrase meaning "thus always to tyrants." It is sometimes mistranslated as "death to tyrants" or "down with the tyrant." Supposedly said by Brutus during the assassination of Julius Caesar) as he landed and broke his ankle.

They were a civilian militia formed, like those of other Federal Departments during the Civil War, to help protect the Capital from Confederate attack. Regimental colors (flags) were the focus and rallying point of an infantry regiment in battle. The flags were very large in order to be seen through the dense smoke created by artillery and musket fire by men standing shoulder to shoulder in line-of-battle. However, the flags could not be so long as to drag on the ground or fly in the faces of the men in the second rank; so, they were made almost square.

When the U.S. flag was made in this style, the union (the blue field with the stars) became tall and narrow. The stars were painted with gold because it did not tarnish and stayed clean longer than silver or white. There is no special significance to the stars being in an oval pattern; this is only one of many different patterns used during the period.

My views of Ford’s Theater, like many, are from television specials, movies and documentaries. It is quite unassuming from the outside and somewhat disappointing to see against the “Disneyland” atmosphere of tourists, tour guides and hawkers selling trinkets in shops all over and across the street. But once inside, the noise fades away and you can almost smell the black powder wafting through the room and the screams of the crowd. The original theatre once held 2,400 people but now holds about 600. I may need to add seeing a play there to my bucket list.

Once we departed, we made our way to one of Dianna’s choices, the International Spy Museum. Ok, it’s not the Smithonian or the National Archives….but it is a very popular spot and kind of cool. It’s privately owned so there’s no photography but you get to wander through three floors dedicated to the history of espionage.

I was a little skeptical but was won over as we got to see actual early and some current technology used by early 007s of all sides to gather intelligence on our perceived foes. The museum takes you from the earliest examples of spying and cryptography (ciphers). Samples could be as common as tattooing messages on the shaved heads of slaves by the Greeks in 500 BC (that had to hurt and probably limited the message length) to the more exotic disappearing inks and digital means.

The first known military cipher in history was developed by Julius Caesar. His code was very simple. In fact, you could probably crack it, if you took a bit of time. He just replaced one letter of the alphabet with another and it never changed. As time and technology took over, ciphers went from printed text generated from mechanical devices like the famous “Enigma” German disk system of WWII to the digital age which includes the use of Steganography where text is mingled into the pixels of photos. The hiding of those bits (encryption) now is generated by Supercomputers that fill rooms in the NSA to protect secrets.

There was some cool spy gear like wire recorders and other means for spys to communicate with their bosses. Yes, there was a real Maxwell Smart shoe phone too. Realizing that some of this stuff was fabricated with the 50s and 60s technology of their time, I was truly amazed how things with vacuum tubes and early solid state circuitry were stuffed into everyday items like luggage, attache cases and clothing. Not to mention that we have a million times more computing power in our phones and watches than these spy masters would have dreamed of. Makes you wonder what’s out there today.

What was a little surprising (and a little doomsday dark), was a video presentation at the end which kind of signalled to me the agenda of the owners under the title “New Threats”. It was a 15 minute discussion of how the Cold War wasn’t really over and how our old/new enemies were attacking the American way of life through cyberspace. The video speaks to the contemporary challenges of something they’ve termed “Weapons of Mass Disruption”. They glance over simple cyber attacks like computer hacking of e-mail and websites with a heavy emphasis on how our current infrastructure is dependent on computer networks which are very vulnerable to attacks by our new enemies (i.e. China), Al Qaeda and the other rogue terrorist groups. Very sobering and some in the group viewing seemed visibly worried by the presentation. A very entertaining break in our DC trip.