June 28, 2009: Apollo 11 command module “Eagle” at the National Air and Space Museum, Washington DC. The heat shield after re-entry kind of looks like the surface of the moon, doesn’t it?
The command module is the one piece of the Saturn V rocket, one of America’s greatest engineering triumphs, that remains at the end when the astronauts came home. I have seen at least four of them:
- Apollo 11 at the Smithsonian on June 28, 2009 (above).
- Apollo 12 at the Virginia Air and Space Center on July 10, 2008.
- Apollo 14 at Kennedy Space Center on May 29, 2009.
- Apollo 16 at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, October 27, 2016.
- Apollo 17 at Johnson Space Center in Houston on December 30, 2005.
I might have seen Apollo 8 at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago when I was much younger.
Major parts of the National Air and Space Museum are closed for long-term renovations, crowding out a chance to mark the 50th anniversary of the first lunar landing. We’re finally getting updates to an exhibition hall that, a decade ago, stopped the space timeline in 1981. (I covered some of this ground in a Des Moines Register column after Neil Armstrong died, but it has vanished into the ether.)