Shuttle Nose

2013-06-23 Shuttle Nose Today we paid a visit to the California Science Center to see the Space Shuttle Endeavour. It's been the photo of the day twice before - first when it flew over for the last time and landed at LAX (on my birthday, no less), and again when I joined half the city in watching it travel through the streets. It was fun to see it today because you could really take it all in and look closely at all the details. There are some great exhibits, although this whole area is temporary while they build a new permanent building for it. The coolest things I learned today were about the SSMEs - Space Shuttle Main Engines: - There are three on each shuttle when it was prepped to fly, and they were swapped between the shuttles - there weren't enough for all of them. - The fuel is hydrogen and oxygen, so the only exhaust is water. - When it's going, the nozzle of the engine is cool to the touch (not that you'd be standing there to find out) because of 2 miles of tubing with coolant, while the inside is 6k degrees F (3.3k C) which is enough to boil iron. - Like, whoa. [last year] not fun, we've come a long way...

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