Visit to Seattle’s Museum of Flight (Patreon)

I have spent a few days in Seattle visiting two vintage tech museums: the Museum of Flight and the Connections Museum, both located close to one of Boeing’s former test runway.

The Museum of Flight has an impressive collection of aircrafts, beautifully displayed, including this unique SR-71 version carrying a hypersonic drone launcher. You can also climb in an SR-71 cockpit. They even have a real Concorde that you can climb in.

But I spent most of my time in the space gallery, which has Apollo artifacts, and also the best and most complete coverage of the Soviet side of the space race I have seen in a museum.

They have the first complete Block II Command Module delivered to NASA, CM-007A. It is in spectacularly good shape.

The inside is promisingly complete.

The full control panel can be admired.

Here is the lower right USB section that Eric is trying to reproduce.

There are even some panels down the side of the lower bay that I did not know existed.

They also have the Block II hatch exposed separately, and you can inspect its crazy complicated and life-saving quick-latch mechanism.

They also have a complete F1 engine. I knew it was big, but in person it’s positively overwhelming. It is a monster of an engine. I was trying to figure out the plumbing at the top, and I just couldn’t see it, it was too far up - like two stories high. A friendly docent observing me joked that they should bring me a ladder.

And I did not know, but local celebrity Jeff Bezos tried to fish out the F1 engines from the spent first stages of the Apollo missions out of the ocean. And he succeeded! Twice as deep as the Titanic. He gets a nerd bonus point in my book. Here are some recovered pieces from the Apollo 16 F1 engines, the combustion chamber and the driving part of the turbopump.

They recovered the injector plate.

They of course celebrate local company Boeing, a big donor to the museum, who built the Saturn V first stage and the lunar rover. The rover is on display, complete with its S-band antenna deployed.

And here is our friend the lunar camera, color edition.

Hanging from the roof is a LM ascent stage.

Many more treasures, including an IMU (the inertial platform), also Block II, and also presented for close inspection.

On a side note, this cabinet with all the manned space flight rockets to the same scale surprised me. I had not fully appreciated the huge difference in size between the Saturn 1B and the Saturn V rockets, the latter did no even fit in the same frame. But the 1B itself dwarfs the Gemini (Atlas) and Mercury rockets (Titan ans Redstone). The Redstone looks puny!

If you ever find yourself in Seattle, this is a place no to miss.

Marc