The Duc Pond

My parents, Amy and I went to a wedding reception in the D.C. metropolitan area this past weekend. Amy got to see how the Vietnamese celebrate weddings and to meet my mom’s side of the family.

On Sunday we went to the National Air & Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. This is not the NASM in D.C., but a new facility that was built on Dulles Airport. It’s so awesome.

My favorite plane from childhood, the SR-71 Blackbird, is there in all its glory. It’s the fastest plane ever built and was used for reconnaissance. Very cool.

The space shuttle Enterprise is also there. They’re not finished getting it ready so you can walk up close to it, but it’s still awesome to see a shuttle less than a hundred feet away. Enterprise wasn’t built to launch (it has no engines and the thermal tiles are all fake) but it was mounted on a 737 and released for glider tests before the other shuttles flew.

A Concord (only commercial supersonic passenger plane) is there, the Enola Gay (first plane to drop an atomic bomb) is there, a few space modules, cruise missiles, and planes from all kinds of eras. They even have an F-35 there! And that plane hasn’t even hit full production! The F-35, if you didn’t know, is the Joint Strike Fighter, which is the next generation fighter. See the 2 hour Nova episode on the battle between Boeing and Lockheed for the X-35 (pre-F) contract for details.

Anyway, it was awesome.

The National Museum of American History was very cool too. The Information Age exhibit is filled with all kinds of old computers and stuff, kinda like the Franklin Institute but more. They have Deep Blue (defeated chess master Gary Kasparov), old TVs, old TV studio equipment, a piece (or a reproduction of a piece) of ENIAC. So much neat stuff.

Go there or be square!