My not-so-inner geek
September 30th, 2007 by Zofia
For those of you who know me well or have known me for long enough you will recall my obsession with anything astronomy and space related. I seem to recall friends at school joking that I would probably end up the first female head of NASA if I continued down the geeky path I was on back then. But life happened and plans changed, still, I have always kept my interest. In my last job my most regularly visited website was the NASA one (until I got sucked into the wonderful world of Stuff!!) and so imagine my delight when I discovered that here in London, only half an hour away from where I live, was the Science Museum complete with a section dedicated to space science!!!!!
So, I decided to go an take a look at what the Science Museum had to offer. On Sunday afternoon I met up with a couple of friends and we went in and explored the museum. It is a rather impressive building full of a lot of stuff to suit all sorts of interests – from cars to computers, DNA to the splitting of the atom, planes to ships, and everything in between! As you will be able to tell by looking at my photos, I was really only interested in the Space stuff. They had a wonderful replica of the Hubble Space Telescope as well as a very impressive replica of a Lunar Lander from the NASA Apollo days! There was also this really cool display of miniature models of all the different types of spaceships, telescopes and satellites in space (including some which looked suspiciously like they featured on Star Wars or Star Trek or something similar!) There was also a token UFO tucked nicely away in a dark corner of the display 
I have also included a picture for you of what the tiles look like at the base of the Space Shuttle – the tiles are all that protect the Astronauts inside the Shuttle from burning up upon re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere! The tiles I am talking about are the small black one in the image, the larger white square is a type of padding which insulates the shuttle. One of these small tiles was damaged when the Space Shuttle Columbia re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere in 2003 causing it to explode and all 7 astronauts on board to perish. Crazy to think how small and fragile these REALLY IMPORTANT object are!
Well the highlight of this visit was definitely the Apollo 10 Command Module!! Apollo 10 was the dress rehearsal mission which did the orbit around the moon paving the way for Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to make their historic Moon landing on Apollo 11 only a few months later. The command module is the one piece of the space ship that returned to earth, carrying the three astronauts inside for a splash landing. Here’s some fun trivia for you, this command module was known to the astronauts as ‘Charlie Brown’ (and the Lunar Module was called ‘Snoopy’) – Is it really geeky that I know this?!
I also saw a poster which I took a photo of because it made me think of my Teta (aunt). This poster is of Valentina Tereshkova the first woman to ever go into space. My Teta is named after her so I thought I would add a poster of what she looked like! – Teta you are much better looking
And finally, something else that caught my attention which you may all enjoy is this Michelin Tyre – the world’s largest tyre!
Very cool, I will definitely be returning to this place.