Recently I took a little vacation from writing and from life in general to go see Washington DC with my family. I have to say, it was a magical experience, from seeing the monuments to watching my kid see real snow for the first time in their life. And then there was the Air and Space Museum.
There is no more fertile ground for a science fiction writer to tread than an actual science museum. It’s incredible to see how far we’ve come in such a relatively short time, from first flight to space travel. Not to mention the weird tangents we went on along the way. Did you know they once made a mobile flying platform that could be controlled by shifting your weight as you stood upon it? It was intended for the military (of course) in the 1950s. There was also a terrifyingly barebones aircraft with a hand-cranked starter that could be dropped to soldiers caught behind enemy lines.
Other highlights included seeing the Enola Gay, which dropped the first atomic bomb in WWII, and the SR-71 Blackbird, which was by far the sleekest and most futuristic-looking of the planes. And of course, there was the shuttle Discovery, which was both incredibly massive and incredibly small when you took into account that it was going into SPACE. This trip reminded me that I need to go to more museums whenever I’m feeling uninspired!
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