2003

Udvar-Hazy Center

This Christmas was special in that on December 15, 2003, the new Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, the Udvar-Hazy Center opened. I had been many times to the Air and Space Museum on the Mall in Washington, DC, it was one of my favorite museums. Sure I liked the Natural History Museum, and the American History Museum, and the National Art Gallery but those were about things in the long past. The Air and Space Museum is a museum of my generation, airplanes, satellites, rockets, computers, traveling to the moon. As a boy I read Popular Science Magazine about all the technology, present and future (no flying cars, yet). I watched John Glen historic space flight and the first step on the moon by Armstrong on TV.  Yes, I loved the Air and Space Museum and even better, the long awaited extension of it, The Udvar-Hazy Center opened.

Located on the grounds of Dulles Airport, The Udvar-Hazy Center was about a twenty-minute drive from where I lived in Reston. I didn’t go to the grand opening which required special tickets, but the day after Christmas I drove out and saw it for the first time. I drove out to it and like all the Smithsonian museums, the Udvar-Hazy Center was free to get in, but the only way to get to it is by driving and it cost $9 to park (now $15). Oh, well. After parking I entered the building and was totally amazed. After checking out the 100 foot entry hall I came to the main hanger which was huge, seven acres in size with the actually full size airplanes sitting on the floor and having from the ceiling. SR-71 Blackbird, the Enola Gay, the first commercial supersonic airliner, the Concord SS, smaller aircraft hung from the ceiling. I wandered about the airplanes, some I knew, I had read about them from reading Popular Science magazine as a boy, I reached out and touched them, here they were in real life. To better view the planes hanging from the ceiling there is a walkway halfway up around the perimeter of the main hanger, so I had to explore that. But there was even more, there was the 1.2 acre space hanger which had rockets, satellites, and….drum roll….., an actual space shuttle.  Well sort of, it was the Enterprise, the first space shuttle which never went into space. It was used for testing and actually had flown after being dropped from a 747 airplane.  Still, it was a space shuttle. I had seen them take off and land at the Kennedy Space Center but always from a distance, I never realized how big it was until seeing it up close. 

In 2012 the Enterprise at the Udvar-Hazy Center was replaced with the newly decommissioned Space Shuttle Discovery which had flown 39 flights into space. The Enterprise was transferred to the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York.

At the end of 2003 AOL had laid off another 500 employees.

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