Wednesday on the Hornet

Snapped this photo of Pathfinder 1 with the USS Hornet while Laura and I were walking to lunch. Wish I'd had the timing or presence of mind to be closer to the Hornet; without all the road and fencing in the foreground, it would have been a real postcard photo!

I spent a few hours aboard the USS Hornet  Sea, Air and Space Museum today, consulting on updates they're making to their Apollo exhibits, to which I contributed 14 or so years ago. It was a beautiful day on the Bay, highlighted by a rare appearance by the Pathfinder 1 Zeppelin, the first rigid airship of its type to fly since the Graf Zeppelin II in 1939. 

I've seen plenty of blimps but don't think I've ever seen a real rigid airship before. The Pathfinder is a pet project of billionaire Sergey Brin and is about half the length of the Hindenburg, which must have been extra awesome in its day because Pathfinder was plenty impressive enough.

It felt especially meaningful for me to revisit Hornet's Apollo exhibits as Artemis returns from the Moon (Hornet was the ship that recovered Apollos 11 and 12 from the Pacific in 1969). I worked on my little project, took my museum-CEO daughter to lunch, and headed home, all the time thinking about the Moon and the 57 years between then and now.

Among the Hornet's artifacts are an Apollo command module boilerplate--a prototype used for testing (CM-011 if anyone wants to look it up)--and a Sea King helicopter, the same type used to recover Apollo 11 and 12. The actual helicopter used in those missions crashed in the '70s. This one is the same model that was painted to look like the original for use in the movie "Apollo 13."

The Hornet also as the Mobile Quarantine Facility (i.e., Airstream trailer) used for Apollo 14, as well as one of the Biological Isolation Garments the astronauts donned to protect the Earth from potential Moon germs. (Spoiler alert: there weren't any Moon germs, but they weren't sure of that at the time.)

The Hornet is closed to the public on Wednesdays, but it would be a lie to claim I was alone. There were museum staffers on hand plus two school buses worth of students. However, an aircraft carrier, even an old one like the Hornet, is big enough to swallow a hundred people without a belch, and once in a while you can still get half a hangar deck all to yourself.

San Francisco shining across the Bay, featuring three modes of transportation: rigid airship high in the sky, ferry plying the waters toward Alameda, and, in the distance above the city, a red Coast Guard helicopter.