Field Trip

On Earth Day, Mister and I went on a school PTO-sponsored trip to the Detroit Science Center . Sorry, no pictures. (My digital camera died. But it looks like I fixed it after the trip by cleaning out the battery compartment to get rid of the residue from a battery leak a while back.)

We started early on Saturday, making it to the school at 9:30 to munch on bagels before boarding the bus rented by the PTO. One of the PTO parents had a pump-powered rocket to whet the appetite for space-related fun. Mister thought it was pretty cool. Amazingly, a lot of children scampered to get under the falling missile rather than sensibly getting out of the way. I cringed every time it came down on the pavement but no child was nuked.

As it turned out, the turnout for the event was better than expected so the PTO needed some parents to drive. Low on gas, owning a small Ion, and unwilling to add to my 400+ miles that I drive each week, I declined the request. But I did volunteer to ride with someone else so the kids could all ride on the bus.

Only ten minutes behind schedule, we headed out. At the last minute the principal called out to me and I scampered from the SUV I was in and headed to join Mister on the bus. I wasn't sure if this was a promotion or not after my last bus trip with children. But Mister was glad to have me on board in the end.

The trip was uneventful, but with the late start, time it took to park, and the wait to get in, we didn't have the planned half hour to roam before lunch. So we headed right for the cafeteria to eat. I'd eaten breakfast and a bagel, so I could have waited, but this was the plan so we ate. [OK, I just read that and it was really boring so let me skip ahead.]

The Detroit Science Center is big but it really has less to play with than the Ann Arbor Hands On Museum, really. But there was some really cool stuff like the A-10 in the wind tunnel that you could fly. There was the sail boat exercise with a fan to show how you can sail into the wind. There were gears to turn and some other tinker toy things to build, plus a periodic demonstration counter where the staff showed kids how to build stuff or just showed experiments. We also found a really cool spinning metal plate with plastic and metal rings that you could balance on the plate if you got them spinning. We only had a little chance to play with this before we headed off to the IMAX theater.

We watched a Tom Hanks-narrated film about the mission to the moon. The imagery was astounding and the pictures were mostly new to me. I loved the shots of the astronauts practicing on Earth for their tasks in space. That a hand-held calculator has more computing power than the Apollo computers was just weird to absorb. And the inability to tell scale or depth without structures or air was pretty weird. The description of an astronaut--warned that he was on the edge of a massive canyon--that there was nothing to worry about because it was just a gentle slope was scary. In fact, he was on the edge of a canyon deeper than the Statue of Liberty is tall!

One thing that struck me as odd was the statement by Hanks that these were ordinary men, really, who looked just like us. Hey, Im no multi-cultural nutcase, but these were all white men. Nothing wrong with that. Really. I am one. But why make that statement when the era of Apollo was one that could not have anybody but men who look like me. Not that these astronauts should have their achievements lessened because of the era in which they lived. Their achievements would be no more amazing if done with crews that look like a finely balanced GAP commercial. But I really wished that Hanks had used a different line to convey the portrayal of these men who were thrown into space in primitive craft far from home if anything went wrong. I would have thought Hanks would have had a better ear for that. Or maybe Ive just lived in Ann Arbor too long.

I stayed to watch all the credits just to see the pictures in the background. Old black and white pictures from long ago. It is all just history. It is deeply depressing to think that only a dozen men have walked on the moon and weve gone more than three decades without doing anything on the moon. Hell, we drove cars on the moon! When I was little, looking ahead to 2000, I assumed we'd have wonderful stations in space and on the moon. Instead we have a tenement with solar panels that we grandly call the International Space Station and a shrunken Shuttle fleet that is too expensive and too dangerous to do us much good. I'm glad we have a goal of returning to the moon and going to Mars, but I have little hope that NASA will do it. I have more hope that private businesses will finally get us into space. But now I don't even assume I'll live to see it. We should fill the Solar System and instead we putter around in our own gravity well just poking above it on occasion and doing nothing terribly exciting when we do so. But our society has become so comfortable that at least a sizable minority of the people would blast any money spent to send man into space by complaining about how many Midnight Basketball games could be funded. We should take every dollar that goes to PBS and NPR and shovel it into space. Let private business go, too; but shovel money at space travel and I don't care if it is inefficient. Just go! Is it really possible that when my son takes his son to science museums that they will view the same Apollo pictures as the high point of our space ambitions?

Ok, enough ranting.

We had about an hour and a half after the movie to see the special space exhibit, which I liked a lot. I didn't know Apollo used fuel cells for power and drinking water. And we headed back to the spinning table which Mister really wanted to play with. We worked on getting the disks spinning by using our finger tips like axles until they balanced and moved around the disk. A lab-coated staff member--really pretty, I should add--came by and started showing me how to get the one odd ring going when she saw I was having problems with it. It was her favorite display, she said, and we chatted off and on for quite a bit about the display. Mister loved it and was a little annoyed that some adult woman kept picking up his already spinning disks to redo them! It was hard enough to get them going just right and she just snatched them up! So he started deliberately screwing up his launches to send his disks careening into her disks. I had to laugh about that when he told me later! I should have been disapproving but really--what was the woman thinking?

With a short time left before we had to hit the bus, I grabbed Mister so we could go to the gift shop. I thanked the staff woman for taking so much time to help with the display and we rushed off to the gift shop. [Hmm, reading that back, did I just miss an opportunity? She was cute. Oh good grief, I'm such a total idiot ]

Anyway, I'm sure my friends will take care of berating me when I relate this the next time we get to the bar (And I really need to get on that, too). Perhaps I'm mistaken anyway.

I picked up a rocket kit that works with vinegar and baking soda. We looked at it on the way home and I think it is a bit of a ripoff since a lot of the parts look pretty cheap. On the other hand, except for the special nozzle, I can scrounge up replacement pieces pretty easily when they break and build new rockets. Perhaps Mister (who loves math and is good at it) will be part of the next push into space. Maybe, if I'm lucky, my son's generation will be the one that really gets us into space for good. And then I'll be lucky enough to see it happen in my lifetime.

That would be a pretty rewarding lifetime, after all.