National Air and Space Museum! The cool one...

Apparently there are two Air and Space museums, one in downtown DC and one by the Dulles airport, we saw the airport version which is spectacular! I mean, how often do you get to see this?



Or this??



The space shuttle is so cool to see in person, TV does not do it justice. It's weird though, for some reason, whatever they made it out of makes it look kind of like a really big plastic space shuttle toy. It just looks too clean. That might be because this particular shuttle (The Enterprise...which was named after the Starship Enterprise, seriously) was never actually used in "space". They took it on some test flights in the atmosphere and it was supposed to go to space, but never got the chance...sad huh?



Also kind of sad that none of the SR71 blackbirds fly anymore because satellites kind of made them obsolete. But at least that means we got to see one up close and personal.



But perhaps my favorite part of the museum were the display cases full of random artifacts from spaceflights going all the way back to the Apollo missions. For instance:



I read in horrified fascination about the issue of 'waste management' in space.





Yeaaaah.

The space food display was almost as entertaining. After reading the answers, I brought Brent over and quizzed him on what kind of food was in each container, he got them all wrong. See if you can do any better!



Also, I asked my brother Alex while I was in the museum what his favorite plane of all time was so I could find it, but unfortunately they have no mustangs at ALL. What a shame. He said his second favorites were the SR71 and the F15...they didn't have the F15, all they had was this lowsy F14 Tomcat. Sorry.



But you might actually appreciate this life size (ok, almost life size) model of Optimus Prime that they had by the IMAX theater where they were showing the latest transformer movie.



This is a must see in DC. If you have the opportunity to go, do it!