museum
so the weather wasn't so great yesterday: lots of raining. we couldn't do any surveying because of that, so roberto stayed at the hotel to look at the data we had collected on friday while roy and i went to the san diego air and space museum. that was a lot of fun. up front, they had the apollo 9 command module (gumdrop) and some artifacts from the space program, including a piece of the liberty bell 7. they also showed what the cockpit of the 'spirit of saint louis' looked like, and that was interesting. most of the instruments are the same as in cessnas, but they looked a bit different.

through the rest of the museum, they showed the aircraft throughout the years, so you could see how they evolved. they had a movie playing toward the end showing some people reconstructing the ho-229, which was a stealth jet that the germans were working on toward the end of world war ii. they got it to fly, although its engines were unstable, so it crashed after a couple months of testing. but from the model, the people determined that the allies wouldn't have been able to detect it until it got within 2.5 minutes of britain and it was much faster than the planes the allies had at the time. the germans were also working on a scaled-up version that could have crossed the atlantic. they made a deal about how that could have delivered an atomic bomb that the germans were also working on, but the war would probably have had to stretch on for quite a bit longer for that to have mattered.

they also had a jet (the x-13, i think) that could take off and land vertically. lots of fun stuff.

after the museum, we wandered around the uss midway, but didn't feel interested in spending the $18 to get inside. and yeah. no surveying today, either. the weather is good, but the wave heights are too big and would obscure the beach area.