Hey hey USA - 19th October - the Space Museum, our final frontier

 

That Wednesday was to be our last full day in southern New Mexico. As most of our family is nuts about aviation and space travel, going to the New Mexico Museum of Space History was an obvious thing to do.

To get there we had to drive across the Tularosa Basin, past the White Sands Park and the Missile Range to the foothills of the Sacramento Mountains and the town of Alamogordo.

As you can see it was a beautiful day and at last we were able to take our jumpers off. 

Why Alamogordo in this remote corner of the US, for a space museum? Much of the early work on the space programme took place on the Missile Range and a Space Hall of Fame was established here in 1973.

This was the foundation for the museum, which opened in 1976 and also has a planetarium and iMax cinema.

We had our lunch in the car park looking at the view back over the Tularosa Basin to the San Andres Mountains.

There are a number of artefacts to see outside the museum and we had a thorough look at them.

These are sounding rockets used to carry instruments up to about 90 miles above the earth's surface for scientific research. The white dishes are acoustic mirrors and there were a pair of them so that we could whisper across between them.

One of the largest exhibits was the rocket Little Joe ll which was used between 1963 to 1966 for uncrewed tests of the Apollo mission. These were launched from White Sands Missile Range.

This is a Starchaser rocket made in the the UK

A Tornado. Obviously the red barrier is stopping it taking off.

There was also a collections of missiles.

Finally there was time for a little fun.

Inside the museum there were good views over the desert and the exterior displays.

One of the major exhibits in the museum is the story of Ham, the chimpanzee who went up into space in a Mercury capsule in 1961. He was launched from Canaveral, but is buried in the grounds of the Space Museum as his training took place in Alamogordo.

Inside the museum is the capsule Ham was jetted off in, his spacesuit and the chair he sat in to undertake scientific experiments. He was trained to pull a lever in response to sound and light, being rewarded with banana pellets.

You will be pleased to know that Ham splashed down safely in the ocean and was rescued. He shook hands with the commander of the recovery ship and accepted an apple, although he became very agitated when he got back to Canaveral and was confronted with the paparazzi. He lived out the rest of his life in the Washington Zoo and latterly the North Carolina Zoo, finally dying in 1983 aged 26. 

More monkeying around.

We went to two shows at the planetarium and finally left the museum in the late afternoon and headed up into the mountains.