One of the reasons why we went back to Chincoteague this past weekend, entirely apart from Oz's obsession, was to attend the Open House at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility. This was so much fun—almost as much fun as working there, maybe. We got to ogle aircraft, see exhibits and poster sessions about different projects, collect swag, and tour some of the facilities and a mobile command center. It seemed that many of the people in attendance were connected with the facility in some way, either they worked there and this was an opportunity for them to bring their families on campus or they were retired from there and this was an opportunity for them to lord it over their former minions.
Our swag collection consisted of stickers, a poster about ice (I didn't manage to snag a "MARS: Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport" poster, which is too bad because they were really cool), more stickers, bookmarks, a lanyard, a pin, a magnet, two collapsible Frisbees (when I was using one as a fan on one of the shuttle busses, the lady behind me tried to give me a fan from the balloon project), and flyers from NASA branches and contractors who are probably not hiring.
The Control Center was open for a presentation about what the WFF is all about. The big screens on the walls displayed control-center-y images, old launch videos, and a really old black and white video about the facility that must have dated back to the 1950s (and featured a clip of well-muscled, shirtless, perspiring engineers assembling a rocket under the noonday sun).
We also got to tour the machine shop where they make rockets. The rockets are made out of big aluminum tubes, so we saw lathes and other metal shaping equipment. I am so not a mech-e, big machines are not my thing, although one machine was pretty neat. The new computer-controlled water jet cutter was demonstrated for us by a guy who hadn't been trained on the machine yet, so he'd been teaching himself to use it by cutting metal into pretty bits shaped like flowers, F-15s, fish, and a bowl full of rocket-shaped keychain fobs. For the little kids in our group, he offered to cut out some F-15s. One asked, "Can you do a Stealth?" "No, I don't have a Stealth programmed in there. But I can do an F-15," he said, but only got a noncommittal "Oh" in return.
And, by the way, our tour group included a lot of little old ladies who asked sharp questions about rockets. I found this surprising, because most of the little old ladies I know are mainly interested in sewing and doll collecting. I hope someday I'll be the little old lady who elbows her way, gently but firmly, to the front of the crowd to press her nose against the plexiglass and watch plates of metal being sliced apart with jets of water and sand, or whatever they're using to cut metal in forty years.
After the pieces parts of the rockets are made, the rockets are assembled and tested to make sure they won't fall apart when they're launched. One of the things they do is spin the rocket to make sure it's balanced. The rocket spins for stability when it flies and, just like a washing machine load, it needs to be balanced if it's going to fly straight. Not that a washing machine flies straight or otherwise, but if the load is unbalanced it will dance across the floor. Anyway, there is a big machine that spins rockets. It's so old it has vacuum tubes in it.
In the testing area, industrial fans pointed at the ceiling and parachutes floated up and down above them. A really big scale subtracted twenty-five pounds off my weight (it must have been zeroed to a twenty-five pound tray). The building had a tall, narrow doorway especially for rockets.
We had fun. Can you tell?
664 words | October 4, 2005 07:37 PM | Wish you were here