June 22, 2022 - Wednesday - Today we went to visit the Columbia Memorial Space Center (CMSC). The CMSC is a science museum owned and operated by the City of Downey, CA. The site of the museum is the former Boeing/Rockwell/North American plant where all of the Apollo Command/Service Modules were built and the Space Shuttle was conceived. The CMSC is recognized as the National Memorial to the Space Shuttle Columbia and its seven member crew that was lost on STS-107 on February 1, 2003.
This mural is a collage of thousands of individual photographs.
There are many intelligent activities for children here. I made a paper airplane that was later launched by a machine, pretty cool! There's a robotics laboratory here so I sat down and wrote the code for my little robot to travel to an object, pick it up and return back to base. It worked for me on my first attempt.
My robot is shown below, number 16. The docent was expecting a crowd of 85 kids later in the day!
The crew of STS-107:
Rick Husband, Commander
William C. McCool, Pilot
Michael P. Anderson, Mission specialist
Kalpana Chawla, Mission specialist
David M. Brown, Mission specialist
Laurel Clark, Mission specialist
Ilan Ramon, Payload specialist
Before the museum we had lunch at Bob's Big Boy Broiler, also in Downey.
The Big Boy Burgers were delicious and their French fries can't be beat.
