January 27, 2005 - Alamogordo Space History Museum and White Sands N.P., New Mexico

It was still raining the next morning, so we decided to see the space history museum and put off driving over to White Sands until the afternoon in the hopes that it would clear up. The space museum was at the northeast corner of the city of Alamogordo right next to a branch of New Mexico State University. The museum had a nice collection of rockets sitting out in front, among which were a beat up tail section from a WWII German V-2 and complete versions of some of the smaller U.S. rockets.

Inside, we paid our admission fee and took the elevator to the 4th floor to begin our tour. The exhibit area on each floor was designed as a circuit where you would end up taking a ramp the next floor below. One floor emphasized more the hardware and history of development of the rocket, going back to ancient Chinese rockets. Besides tracing the development of the modern rocket from the Congreve rockets used by the British in the early 1800s, critical pieces of rocket systems such as thruster nozzles, fuel pumps, and steering systems were on exhibit. I always enjoy looking at the real nuts and bolts of a system, so that was fun for me although most normal folks might give the pieces short shrift.

Other exhibit floors focused on different topics such as on the people involved in space flight. That focus included a "Hall of Fame" idea where important folks in space research were inducted each year. They displayed a full-scale replica of Robert Goddard's first liquid fuel rocket, but I thought he was otherwise given rather short shrift for being the pioneer of U.S. rocketry that he was. Werner Von Braun, on the other hand, was given extensive coverage in the history of U.S. rocketry. Having personally visited the German V-2 (or A-4) rocket development site at Peenemuende and read first hand accounts of the POWs used as slave laborers by Von Braun's development team (see Wanderung 2), I just couldn't work up any admiration for the man. On the other hand, I was happy to see that Carl Sagan had been inducted into the Hall of Fame, partly I presume for his real scientific contributions and possibly also for his brilliant popularization of science such as the "Cosmos" book and TV series.

Space satellites had a goodly-sized section all to themselves, and we enjoyed reading about them. Some, like the big Echo I balloon that I actually saw orbiting at night, were memories right out of my past. It was interesting to see how they had folded that big balloon into a nosecone for its ride into space. Other satellites were very much playing a role in our present daily life.

For most folks, I guess, the important satellites would be the ones used for telephone relay and TV broadcasts, but for me the most important satellites of all were the Global Positioning Satellites. I was using my GPS receiver every day and all day while driving on this and previous Wanderungs, and even walking out on the dunes in White Sands later in the day I was carrying a small GPS receiver. They had a full-sized mock up of a GPS satellite there, and I was not only surprised that it had 3 atomic clocks (are two backups or do they average the time signals?), but also just amazed at the sheer size of the thing. It was roughly a 7-foot cube and that might not sound very big, but it was the size of our entire dining and living room in the camping trailer!

The space museum had 2 very nice hands-on simulators and I, of course, tried them both out (repeatedly-some joke about not being able to separate "the boys from their toys" would probably be appropriate here, but I won't make it). One simulated landing the space shuttle, and I had always wondered how tricky getting that multi-ton flying brick safely down in a dead stick landing really was. The answer is very tricky indeed. I was at the "novice" level where I just had to control the pitch axis, and it still took me 4 tries to get an acceptable landing. If I had more time to practice, I could have tried the more difficult scenarios like crosswinds or night landings, but another guy was looking hungrily over my shoulder so I had to be satisfied with one good landing and then giving up the controls.

The other simulator was of the use of those rocket chairs that astronauts use to do excursions outside the shuttle, and again I've always wondered how they were controlled. There, I had a very different set of controls than in a normal airplane (thrust forward or reverse, thrust up versus down and left versus right), and that took some getting used to. I wasn't even controlling any rotate-around-the-axis thrusters (which I imagine they have), and it still took me 4 tries to dock successfully with the Hubble Space Telescope. Poor Hubble, by the way, apparently it will be killed next year to help finance the Bush "man living on the moon' boondoggle, which is a case of good basic science sacrificed on the altar of political showboating. Anyway, if you get this way and try these simulators, I have a Very Important Tip: WAIT for the instruction briefing to finish. Whatever you do, don't start playing around with the controls just to get a feel for them like I did, because what that does on these simulators is to skip all the instructions and take you directly to the task, which you would then be facing without a clue as to how to proceed.

We broke off at 11 for a presentation of a film called "Forces of Nature" at the Imax theatre just down the hill. It covered volcanoes, earthquakes, and tornadoes and was as impressive as any of the Imax films I have seen. Seeing the pyroclastic flows from a volcanic eruption come streaming straight down the hill at you, or watching a huge tornado bearing straight down at you in the Imax format can be a moving experience, to say the least. It was so moving, in fact, that I made the mistake of craning my head around at different parts of the picture too much and started to get the first faint queasiness of motion sickness The moral to that story is no matter how interesting the movie, don't crane your neck for a better view! After the movie we finished up the last floor back at the space museum and headed off to lunch at Wendy's.

Although it rained hard while we were having lunch, we persisted in driving the 13 miles from Alamogordo to White Sands National Monument after lunch to at least see the place. Fortune was smiling on our bull-headed perseverance, however, because the sky gradually cleared as we drove over and toured the small museum in the Visitor Center. By the time we drove out to the dunes and started to wander around, the sun was occasionally lighting the dunes up in a dazzling whiteness that was quite remarkable.

The white cast of the dunes stems from the fact that they are composed of gypsum sand rather than the more typical silicate based sand. The small gypsum particles make a brilliant white reflective surface for the sun, and the name White Sands is fully justified. What most folks don't mention, I think, is how the roughly 10 mile by 30 mile area of dunes is surrounded by mountain peaks. To my mind, the combination of startling white dunes against layered rather reddish mountains under a deep blue sky must be one of the most unusual scenes in the world.

After wandering around the dunes on our own for an hour or so, we also participated in a Ranger led walk right before sunset. The Ranger pointed out several of the adaptations plants had made to survive being inundated by these 30 to 60 foot high moving mounds of gypsum sand. Some plants adapted by growing up through the dune, other plants consolidated dune material with their root system, and still others just clung to the inter-dune depressions where the eked out a living by ingesting nitrogen fixing cyano bacteria with their root system.

Monika remarked on the way the blue cast of the sky changed from a powder blue around the horizon to a deep indigo blue at the zenith, which is a phenomenon we had never seen before. When the sun finally set, the mountains over beyond Alamogordo were bathed in an almost orange colored "Alpenglueh" light, which I have seen only rarely before and never having hues that strong. But the colors faded away as suddenly as they had come when the sun set behind the mountains to the west, and we all trekked back to our cars to drive home. We were happy to have seen White Sands National Monument at its best, and after dinner Monika enjoyed working with the pictures while I brought the journal up to date.

One curious thing I found when reviewing the pictures was that I couldn't find any of the many dune pictures we took that I really liked. On the one hand, this may have been another instance of that strange interference between having just seen the real thing and then reviewing the pictures of it the same evening which we have experienced at other places. I have often found that I have to wait several days to a week or more before I can really distinguish the "great" pictures from the merely "good" ones, and I wondered if professional photographers have the same problem. On the other hand, it may also be the case that to bring out the shapes of the dunes really well one should have a 3-D stereo picture of some kind.