Aerospace Museum
We used one of our precious Family Days during the Thanksgiving holiday to visit the Aerospace Museum of California, which happens to be in our town on a closed Air Force base. Ian and Lucas like this place a bunch. I was mainly along for the traveling StarTrek exhibit, which had … um … too many rules.
Needless to say, we all had fun punching buttons on the Enterprise bridge and raising the deflector shields. Asher’s big idea was to fire the phasers on the aliens. We declined to pay $20 for a photo of Ian in Kirk’s chair. I found the costumes from the various TV shows to be pretty interesting.
In the main museum, we saw an exhibit about the future “Manned Mission to Mars” (planned for 2034), including this replica of the Phoenix Mars Lander …
… and a movie about what going to Mars will be like someday.
There’s a mini jet plane for the kiddos.
And outside they have a good number of real airplanes from various eras. This is Lucas in the cockpit of the “Warning Star,” an intelligence gathering plane. Asher was the cutest copilot ever.
An older gentleman docent inside that plane talked with me for quite a while about serving as ship’s engineer. He flew 6,000 hours on this type of plane, and his job was to monitor these gauges and manually tweak the fuel mixture for either fuel efficiency or increased power, depending on the situation. He blushed after a few minutes and exclaimed, “I don’t get many ladies asking me about this stuff. Most ladies don’t get it.” Ha! It was fun to make his day.
Ian always knows where to find the danger. Especially when it’s this well marked. (This is the side of a Coast Guard helicopter.)
I’m not the biggest airplane fan, and frankly, I don’t need to return to this museum for a couple of years. But my boys enjoy it plenty. And some of this stuff is pretty nifty even to me, like these cogs inside an engine on display.
The StarTrek exhibit is there until January, in case you want to check it out.
November 29, 2010 at 8:31 pm
The replica TOS bridge captures the original look and feel very well. All primary colors, glowy lights and a soundtrack right from Desilu. After several little kids moved on, I sat in The Chair. (Oh yeah… baby)
Asher wanted to play, but Lucas has grown past it:
Lt. Asher: Its aliens!
Capt. Me: Raise shields.
Lt. Asher: Shoot ’em!
Me: What? No! Communication first. Open a channel. Alien vessel, what are your intentions?
…silence…
Lt. Asher: Shoot em!
Me: Fire photon torpedoes.
Lt. Asher: RIGHT! ptchew! ptchew! bkrrrrr!
So much for the Prime Directive.