It was another bright sunny day and driving through the countryside in these fall colors is really beautiful. I didn’t know Mississippi and Alabama had such gorgeous foliage in the fall.

We drove to Huntsville, AL today, about 2 hours away, to see NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center museum. Huntsville is the site where many of the large rockets and capsules were built for the Apollo missions and also for today’s space shuttles. NASA has a sprawling exhibit over about 40 acres displaying parts of their huge collection of obsolete missiles, space capsules, rocket engines, space suits, the backup moon rover, a moon rock, etc. with an IMAX theater showing Apollo missions to the moon and the Mars rover project, plus there is a “Space Camp” for school children to participate in astronaut type training over a period of days.

It also has a strange collection of other seemingly unrelated things like a Blackbird spy plane, UH1H Vietnam era helicopter, a motorcycle built by Orange County Choppers dedicated to space exploration (a disturbing use of federal tax dollars to build a display for this even though I’m sure Orange County Choppers donated the bike as a publicity stunt), and army recruiting stations.

Overall the space related items and rocket historical engineering parts and pieces were very interesting and the museum was very worthwhile to see. The upkeep of the museum buildings, grounds and displays leave something to be desired, but that’s the status of things like this competing for tax dollars with other federal programs. The huge size of these items is amazing. The upright rocket in the picture with Kathy is just a Saturn I. There’s a Saturn V rocket that’s far too large to display upright and it is on its side in 6 big pieces that is substantially longer than a city block. Even on its side, it’s about 30 ft. tall!

I had taken the corroded cast iron riser manifold from my port engine to a local welding shop so I would have a spare pipe in case one of the other 3 on the boat develops the same problem. The welder was highly recommended by a very large full service marina about one mile down the Ten-Tom canal from us. He did an excellent job jacketing the corroded parts with ¼ inch steel pipe and brazing it to the cast iron. He had to heat the whole large pipe almost to red hot with his torch first to prevent stress cracks from forming in the cast iron if it were heated just where he was welding. I hope I never need it, but it’s now $295 worth of insurance for parts that are impossible to get.