KS Day 4 - Salt Mines, Space Ships, and Sweet BBQ
Today started with a trip to an incredibly sweet coffeeshop called Moxi Junction that won over my heart by being located in a very cute house, having great coffee, and making a concerted effort to provide employment for adults with developmental disabilities. I could have stayed and chatted with the baristas about Disney movies for the whole day, and even if the coffee wasn’t good and strong I can’t think of a better place to start your day. Going there was like a pure shot of positivity.
Heart properly warmed and brain properly caffeinated, I made my way to the small town of Hutchinson which happens to have two of Kansas’ most excellent and strange museums. My first stop was an underground Salt Mine museum called Strataca. You might not expect a museum about salt to be particularly fascinating but you would be dead wrong because Strataca is one of the most unique museums in the country. A big factor for that is that it located in an active salt mine 650 ft. below the ground! You have to take a special industrial elevator down into the mine, and you have to wear a hard hat the whole time in case any chunks of salt fall on your (very unlikely but better safe than salty) which means that the whole time you’re there you look very, very cool.
Strataca is the only salt mine in the country that allows tourists to visit, so unless you’ve worked in a salt mine before the views of being surrounded for miles and miles of salt rocks and crystals is pretty extraordinary. The salt deposits formed over 275 million years ago, and while only a small fraction of it is open to the public the entire salt vein covers over 980 acres stretching for 150 miles all the way to New Mexico! The excavated caverns range from 11-17 ft. highs, so despite being in such an enclosed space it actually feels relatively open. Because of the minimal heat exchange with the outside world, the caverns also maintains a constant temperature of 68 degrees so if you were worried it would be cold and cramped, it really is remarkably comfortable. Between the sheer size of the mine and the way the salt crystals sort of glitter in the light, it’s hard to believe that you haven’t been transported to a completely different planet.
Because they don’t want hundreds of visitors to wear down all that natural beauty, the museum asks that you try not to touch the salt walls, but they’re also very understanding of human nature being what it is so they do leave out a truly impressive 600lb block of salt that people are encouraged to interact with just to get all that tactile curiosity out of their system. It’s really astonishing that this whole behemoth is basically the same thing we use everyday in little shakers.
The first gallery in the museum was dedicated to mining history. Because of the concentration of minerals in the salt, this particular mine wasn’t used for food-based salt products instead supplying the raw materials for industrial salt, rock salt, and road salt in truly impressive quantities. In the earliest days of the mine, all the cutting and digging was done by big strong guys with pickaxes, but gradually the process got more industrial and efficient and dynamite was used to do most of the hard work. While I’m sure it was nice for the miners to not have to do quite so much back-breaking labor, they still had to drill holes in the salt so they could push the explosives in far enough for the blast to not affect them and then haul the salty debris back to the elevator so it wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. Plus I don’t care how many times I was assured it was safe, the idea of blowing up the only thing supporting the cave you’re currently standing in will only ever be terrifying.
While I have nothing but respect for the strength and courage that went into being a miner, judging from the “get ‘er done” spray painted on the salt wall I think they’re taste in stand up comedy wasn’t exactly top notch. To be fair though, 2004 was peak Blue Collar Comedy fame so while I don’t like Larry the Cable Guy much it is sorta funny as a snapshot of a particular (unfortunate) cultural moment preserved forever in minerals.
The next gallery was all about the vehicles and machinery used down in the mines. The hulking mining equipment was impressive to behold, but I was even more impressed by how it got down there in the first place. There was only elevator into and out of the mine, and, while it was pretty big, it wasn’t exactly pick up truck and tractor big so every vehicle you see down there was taken down in pieces and assembled once it was in the mine. Even more unexpected was the fact that salt mines were kind of on the forefront of green engineering, because they couldn’t use vehicles that produced carbon monoxide because the toxic fumes wouldn’t have anywhere to go so when they reassembled the various machines and vehicles they were either outfitted to run on electricity or B100 Bio-diesel, a fuel that is almost 100% cooking oil and doesn’t leave any particles in the air. The outsides of the green machines were also usually salvaged from scrap yards because salt isn’t exactly kind to metal so it would have been silly to use something new if you were just gonna ruin the outside and replace the insides anyways. Recycling at its finest.
Oh and if somehow the sheer size of the mine isn’t coming through yet, there was also a complete train down there and this was just one gallery! Cable car systems called mantrips were the safest option for mass transport of salt and salt miners before the technology for those green engines existed so they were the primary transport down there until the 1980s. As in there were multiple trains and cable cars. The place is gigantic.
One of the more interesting cars in the vehicle gallery was the mining car Mike Rowe used when he visited the Hutchinson Mining Company and got a taste of the salt life. I was big fan of the Discovery Channel one-two punch of Mythbusters and Dirty Jobs when we first got cable some time in the mid-2000s so I got a kick out of seeing the big Mike Rowe cardboard cut-out 600 feet underground.
One of the more surprisingly interesting galleries was all about trash that had been left in the mine over the years. Because there was only one elevator in an out of the mine, it would have been wasteful and somewhat dangerous to keep running it to take trash up and down constantly so miners realized that the simplest solution was to just leave their trash wherever it ended up. Because it’s all salt down there as far as the eye can see, there’s no real danger of the trash down there contributing to pollution and because salt is a natural preservative it’s remained in pristine conditions. These little piles of garbage double as treasure troves of insights into American history through newspaper clippings and little disposable consumer goods. The most interesting thing to me was a newspaper clipping from 1945 about the Osage Nation independently declaring an end to their war with the Axis powers. While many American Indian nations fought logistically as part of the Allied Forces, part of their sovereignty was declaring their involvement in WWII on their own terms. The Osage even declared war earlier the US, which was a fascinating historical tidbit which I never knew and I was surprised to learn via trash in a salt mine.
The next gallery was just focusing on the Salt itself and the different forms it takes from its most rock-like to its most crystalline. The variety of possible structures that the mineral can take blew me away, and it was really pretty in an otherworldly kind of way.
Next up was a special display about one of the salt mine’s most unique contributions to science, the discovery of one of the oldest known living organisms in the form of a bacterium trapped inside a salt crystal. The bacteria were discovered by Drs. Russell Vreeland, William Rosenzweig, and Dennis Powers and are thought to be over 250 million years old! No fossils are found in the mine because it would have been too densely salt for more advanced lifeforms to survive but somehow these brave little microbes were still kicking all these years later living in a sort of hibernating state.
The next gallery was focused on much more recent history with old archival photos from the history of the mine ranging from historically meaningful ones of the first Black miners joining the newly integrated work force to sillier ones such as a bunch of young women striking a pose down in the mine in the hopes of becoming the next Miss Salt Queen. It’s a good reminder that all important progress happens alongside tremendous goofiness.
Up next was a gallery about using salt mines for storage, and idea that has some crazy roots in Nazi douche-baggery. With the Allied forces approaching, Nazi higher ups didn’t want to have give up all the precious art and culture they had stolen from other European nations they’d occupied. An elite group of art historians, preservationists, and soldiers known as the Monuments Men were tasked with finding the stolen art and getting it all back to its rightful place safe and sound. One of the largest repositories of loot was discovered in a salt mine in Austria which had original works by Vermeer, Michelangelo, and Jan van Eyck among others. The salt mine with it’s naturally perfectly regulated temperature and humidity and secure, secluded location made it an ideal storage facility, and hearing this story inspired some wiley business men in the states to make use of all that cavernous space left over in the Kansas Salt mines, and the Hutchinson Salt Mine has offered a place to vault and store precious materials ever since.
The storage vault in this mine contained mostly computer hard drives, paper records (news, medical records, advertising, etc.), props from films, and other things that easily combust under less ideal conditions, are not going to be used anytime soon, and need to be preserved for either legal reasons or cultural relevance.
My favorite part of the vault was all the random pop culture memorabilia that ended up here 650 feet under Kansas. A real delight was getting to see actual original Looney Tunes animation cells in all their glory. The manic energy of the Looney Tunes (especially in Space Jam) was such a big part of my childhood that seeing an actual Bugs Bunny and Sylvester in person honestly left me feeling starstruck.
Far and away, the most exciting thing to me down in the vaults was getting to see Val Kilmer and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s respective outfits from the delightfully terrible Batman & Robin, one of the most incredibly stupid films ever committed to celluloid. Just look at those Bat-nipples! Who the hell let this get made? Naturally I was grinning from ear to ear.
Next up, the other guests and myself hopped on an adorably old-timey train for a little tour through the mines to both give you a feel for how miners used to get around and to really hammer home just how huge and cavernous the place is. It was really cool to get to see even more of the salt mine and to get some nice narration about the day to day operation from the train conductor/ tour guide. Plus, I don’t mean to brag, but I did a much better job not crying for the whole ride than any of little kids who were the primary other passengers.
Because we were in motion, I couldn’t get that many good photos from the train ride, but the ones I did manage to snap really capture the haunting natural beauty of the mine as well as the impressive grossness of all the trash the miners left behind. I don’t think it’s intended to be a statement about how we treat nature, since it was the best option available to the miners, but as a visual it doesn’t exactly show humanity putting our best foot forward.
We also got to drive by one of the original toilets the miners would have used in the first half of the 20th century, which I got a big kick out of if only for how shockingly exposed it was (really it’s just in the middle of everything, those miners must have been awfully comfortable with one another). In case you were wondering how they emptied these things out, they didn’t! So there’s absolutely multiple decades worth of shit still hanging out in there, which could probably offer interesting historic insights but might just be a touch too gross for anyone to want to do that digging at the moment.
When I got back from the train ride, I double checked if I missed anything in the vault and realized that I had initially overlooked Will Ferrel’s wardrobe from Talladega Nights, something I really enjoyed seeing, because I initially thought it was just an actual NASCAR uniform, something that wouldn’t mean much of anything to me. While it was cool to see the clothes (Will Ferrel is a very large man), the thing that I thought was a lot funnier was seeing that every character in the movie had little promotional press materials filled with tons of little crazy jokes for no one’s benefit really other than the people that made them because they’re hardly ever even on screen in the movie.
Next up was the gift shop which was full of more salt shakers than you could shake a salt at (say that ten times fast). Beyond the decorative shakers, they had fancy salt lamps and crystals for hippies and rock enthusiasts alike. If you didn’t want to break the bank on fancy salts, every guest also got their own salt rock from the mine itself as a free souvenir which was pretty neat (I still have mine in my car for good luck!).
Last but not least was “The Dark Ride” a spooky trip through some of the darkest recesses of the mine on little motorized carts called Man-Trips. It wasn’t actually all dark but they did turn all the lights off once the cart was sufficiently far into the mines so that you could experience total darkness. While that was the cool gimmick of the ride, the actual coolest part to me was getting to see some particularly interesting veins of giant salt crystals that have managed to survive largely intact all these years. I never thought I would be down in a salt mine at all over this trip, but I was even more pleasantly surprised by what a fun and engrossing experience it turned out to be.
After all that salt, I worked up quite an appetite so I decided to get some lunch at a fantastic local-Kansas chain called Hog Wild Pit BBQ. I feel like in BBQ discussions, actual Kansas BBQ gets kind of dwarfed by Kansas City BBQ out of Missouri. While Kansas City BBQ (which I’ll get to eventually) is very rightfully lauded as a delicious American culinary achievement, the barbecue from nearby cities is nothing to scoff at. Hog Wild pit smokes and pulls all their meat daily for real fresh and tasty flavors. I ended up going with a classic rib dinner which came with a 1/2 slab, fat slices of Texas Toast, and 2 sides. The ribs were kinda similar to Memphis style in that they were dry rubbed with seasoning but then glazed with sauce later so you sort of had the best of both worlds texture-wise with a mix of crispy charred goodness on top and a juicy tender meat in the middle. It was excellent. For my sides, I went full Southern Comfort food (Kansas is not part of the South in any geographic way, but in culture and cuisine I’ve noticed a lot of overlaps) with some mashed potatoes and gravy and good ol’ Mac and Cheese. It was pretty much a perfect meal.
After spending my morning hundreds of feet underground, it was only fair that I should spend my afternoon shooting for the stars with Hutchinson’s other strange and wonderful museum, The Cosmosphere. The Cosmophere started as one woman’s planetarium, projected onto the ceiling of a Poultry Building in the 1962 State Fair. While the beginnings were meager, something about the growing space race and founder, Patty Carey’s, love and knowledge for all things celestial really struck a cord with the public and it became a huge success, eventually receiving a home at the Hutchinson Community College. Not content with just being a world class planetarium, Patty and her board of directors set their sights on something grander, raising funds, amassing an impressive collection of artifacts from both US and Russian spacecrafts, and eventually in 1980 opening up 35,000-square-foot facility including the planetarium, a three-level exhibit gallery, new classrooms for expanded school programs and one of the first-ever IMAX Dome Theaters. In 1998, they expanded even more and were also granted an honorary affiliate of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, making them the only Smithsonian Affiliate in the whole state. The Cosmosphere also boast the largest collection of Russian spacecrafts outside of Moscow, which really allows them to give a more complete picture of the Space Race than similar air and space museums. If that wasn’t enough to wow you and entice you to visit, they also just sort of casually have an actual rocket engine next to the flag pole out front so there’s no way you’re driving by that and not checking out what the heck this place is all about.
Continuing the wow factor on the inside, the main lobby casually had two fully intact aircrafts just hanging from the ceiling, a Lockheed SR-7 Blackbird stealth plane and a supersonic Northop T-38 Talon. The two crafts couldn’t be more different in both design and purpose with the Blackbird being sleek, black and designed to be sneaky spy plane, while the stark white Talon was all about speed and power being used to train to NASA astronauts to get used to the forces of supersonic travel, but taken together it’s a pretty impressive display to just walk under while you buy your admission ticket.
For timing and money reasons, I decided to leave out the IMAX theater and planetarium and just focus on the main museum collection, and while I’m sure those other facets are incredible the rest of the museum still had so much to love. Before getting to the actual spacecrafts, I did a quick loop around the rotunda where there was some excellent space themed art in the form of a sweeping mural by Robert McCall and a stunningly gorgeous stained glass tribute to fallen astronauts and spacecrafts by craftsmen at Rayer’s Bearden Stained Glass.
The other really cool item in the Rotunda was the founder, Patty Carey’s, original planetarium projector which I was delighted to learn is called a starball. It’s crazy to think that this little guy, and the bright, determined woman operating it, would stoke enough interest in the heavens to eventually lead to this stellar (i’m sorry) aerospace museum.
Sadly modern rocket science really begins with scientists in Nazi Germany, so that is where the main exhibit begins its tale. These ominous origins are detailed in dark but incredible photographs that captures both the grandeur of the scientific vision and the horror of its execution. The largest advancements in Rocket technology came in the form of the V-1 and V-2 rockets, with the V-1 being the first ever long range missile and the more advanced V-2 being the first rocket to go supersonic, being able to travel faster than sound and eventually being the first man-made vessel to enter space. They also tried to develop manned-supersonic jets but primitive rocket fuel was so combustible that only 10 of these test pilots ended up surviving at all and most of them had pretty horrific burns. While these scientific advancements were monumental, they were largely used to instill terror in Allied European nations. Even though only a relatively few V-1s and V-2s actually hit their targets, the damage and fear they caused was immeasurable. The V-2s in particular were terrifying because you couldn’t hear them coming unlike the V-1s, whose distinctive sound led to them being nicknamed Buzz Bombs (on a lighter not they were also nicknamed Doodlebugs which is way too cute a name for a weapon of Mass Destruction). While these high tech bombs initially were a testament to Germany’s military might they were also a testament to everything wrong with the Third Reich. Hitler’s ego and paranoia led to the early V-1s and V-2s being made secretly and quickly in underground factories dug into German mountains, so that they could be continually built without the Allies knowing their whereabouts. The cramped conditions, volatile materials, and use of slave labor from concentration camps led to more people dying from building the rockets than from being hit by them. They also cost a fortune with estimates of the total cost of all the rockets being more than the twice the cost of the entire Manhattan Project. Worse yet, in order to make the rocket fuel they distilled fuel from thousands of pounds of potatoes literally stealing food from German citizens. Between the racism, cruelty, and flagrant disregard for human life across the board, I think the whole operation is a testament that the Hitler guy being a real asshole. One of the worst parts is that by the end, they absolutely knew the bombs would not alter the tide of the war so it was just violence for violence’s sake when they could have just surrendered. A really disgusting amount of loss of life, culture, and property in this world seems to just come from toxic leaders being unable to admit their own failures.
For how bleak the history is, it was really pretty cool to see that the museum had actually salvaged and restored original V-1 and V-2 Rockets:
They also had a big blown up front page from the local newspaper that came out on V-E Day which was a fun way of tying the museum and Hutchinson directly to the world events it was displaying. It’s also kind of funny to me that every political cartoon ever kind of looks the same.
With the end of WWII, the Space race was only really just beginning as the tenuous alliance with the Soviet Union almost instantly crumbled. This was where the museum really took off for me, because as cool as all the artifacts are, I was just riveted by the cold war narrative linking them all together. I had learned bits and pieces of Space Race facts over the years, but seeing all the insane geo-political twist and turns that happen over 50-ish year period is really just a wild ride that would be hard to believe if it wasn’t all true. Things started off crazily right away with a race between Western Powers and the Soviets to capture the scientists behind the German rocket advancements. In a wild stroke of a luck a Polish laboratory assistant discovered a list of German scientists with security clearance in the Rocket division stuffed in a university toilet (you can’t make this stuff up) and managed to get it to British intelligence giving the allies an important time advantage in identifying who they needed to capture. Thus began Operation Paperclip, a plan to covertly capture and evacuate important scientists out of East Germany before the Soviets began their occupation. The US was even able to sweep the mountain factories where the V-2s were built for important documents and equipment. The territory had been officially granted to the soviets as part of the armistice, but it had initially been captured by US soldiers so there was only a small window before Russian soldiers arrived where they could pull off these evacuations. President Truman knew that it would likely strain US-Soviet relations when the soldiers got to the mines and found them empty and that by enlisting former Nazi-scientists in US-centric research it would be a de facto pardon of their war crimes, but the threat of the soviets having sole access to German rocket advancements was deemed great enough to be worth the risk. In this case, Truman was likely right because Stalin was furious when he found the mines stripped as he was absolutely planning on using all that research for his own military, and he went so far as to do a much less subtle evacuation of the remaining German scientists by inviting them to a large banquet, getting them all drunk, and the having secret police burst in and pull off what is believed to possibly be the largest mass kidnapping in recent history. The Cold War was off to the Races.
Next was a nice display about the two brains behind the rival Eastern and Western Space Programs, Sergei Korolev and Werhner von Braun respectively. Both men had a tremendous amount in common as they were both dreamers obsessed with space who were forced to join totalitarian militaries in order to pursue their scientific dreams. Both men were arrested for attempting to slow down their respective war efforts in favor of working on less militaristic rocket possibilities which I think more than anything shows them as weirdly kindred spirits on opposite sides of the cold war. One major difference between their Cold War careers was that the Soviet’s kept Korolev’s identity a secret until after his death only ever referring to him as “The Chief Designer”. Meanwhile von Braun became a minor celebrity in the United States, becoming the first director of NASA and even working with Walt Disney to help popularize the idea of space travel in popular culture. Because of his ultimate success, von Braun’s time spent as a Nazi scientist is largely kind of swept under the rug, and while it’s true he had big ideological differences with Hitler he actually joined the Reich voluntarily, two years before they would have forced him to do so, and he was very much aware that the factories making his V-2 rockets used slave labor from concentration camps so he is not as much a blameless victim of circumstances as many Space Race narratives would like you to believe. To be sure, war forces horrible decisions, but still I think it’s important to acknowledge von Braun’s past before we go further into his accomplishments because history is so rarely made the way we would like it to be and rarely are any figures free of their own specific demons.
Next up was postwar US contributions to aerospace technology. Immediately post-war, the US had no interest in Space. Truman and Eisenhower thought it was too lofty a goal not worth the funding. Ever the pragmatist, Eisenhower wanted to focus US Rocket development on improving ballistic missiles, atmospheric research, and jet engines, things with more immediate usefulness. On the one hand, this was pretty wise long term because it improved our overall military and scientific strength as a nation while also making advancements that would make commercial flying more economically viable. In the long run these things would matter more in the Cold War, but Ike severely underestimated the symbolic power of space travel for boosting American morale even if it may have lacked pragmatism. The error of his judgement would come to the forefront once Russia dramatically made the first foray into Space with Sputnik and it was a lesson Kennedy was particularly quick to pick up on, making a trip to the moon one of the tent poles of his campaign. All that being said the things that did get built during the fifties do have spiffy retro charm to them like things out of of old sci-fi magazines.
von Braun’s biggest success during the early 50s was the Redstone Rocket the first short range ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. The museum had a thankfully inactive Redstone missile on full display and it was a pretty scary but impressive looking thing to behold.
On a lighter note, my favorite part of this section of the gallery was this photo of some of the first animals to every experience extended periods of weightlessness: two mice name Mildred and Albert. I love how they sound like characters from an old British sitcom and how this must have been a very unexpected experience for them.
Things really took a big leap forward on October 4th 1957 when the Soviets became the first nation to launch a man-made satellite into orbit with the Sputnik I. Sputnik couldn’t be more unassuming, basically just a radio transmitter in a little metal ball, but the effect it had on the world couldn’t have been bigger. America’s post war sense of safety and superiority was shattered. The little satellite couldn’t really do anything, but average people had no idea if meant that the Russians could now spy on them or worse yet use it as a weapon. The Russians initially didn’t really want to publicize it so much because there really wasn’t much too it, but when they saw people’s awed and panicked reactions they seized on it as a first class Propaganda device signaling the greatness of Soviet Technology. It’s hard to imagine what it must have been like when the news of Sputnik first broke, but in a pretty incredible get the museum does have an authentic back up satellite for the Sputnik I that would have been used if something had gone wrong with the initial launch. It was pretty unreal.
The Americans really stumbled after Sputnik, not quite anticipating the impact that it would have and the public’s demand for Space exploration. von Braun insisted that the technology from the Redstone rockets could be pretty easily modified to create a satellite capable of reaching orbit, but Eisenhower in an attempt to split the middle between keeping up with the Soviets while not actively antagonizing them, thought it would be better to not use military technology in the US’s first satellite. The gesture of good will intended by Eisenhower’s proposed “civilian satellite” kind of blew up in his face as the first attempt, the Vanguard TV-3 got a little over a meter in the air, exploded, and then fell into some nearby bushes all on national TV. The press called it Kaputnik and it was a massive national embarrassment, but lo and behold just over a month later a different satellite, the Explorer 1, designed much like a modified Redstone rocket became the first US satellite to enter orbit. The damage had been done though, and even though the Explorer I got further into orbit than Sputnik and became the first scientific instrument to record radiation solar winds interacting with Earth’s magnetic field called the Van Allen belt, it was still overshadowed by its Russian counterpart.
It didn’t help the Explorer that in the eyes of the world it was already obsolete before it began, because two months before it ended orbit the Soviets cleared one more milestone hurdle with the Sputnik II, the first vessel to carry a living creature into space. Laika the Space Dog became the first earthling to leave Earth on November 3rd 1957. She managed to make at least one full orbit around the planet but she died within only a couple of hours from overheating. The Russian press though that might reflect poorly on them so they reported that she died several days in from a planned gradual depletion of oxygen, a myth that lasted until her true cause of death was revealed in 2002! My favorite Laika myth though was one that Kruschev used to like to tell people which was that Laika was such a well trained little communist she would bark angrily whenever her ship passed over the USA. I wish that one were true. Besides containing an original back up for the Sputnik II, this stretch of the gallery also contained a general overview of the use of animals in initially rocket testing. It’s up for debate whether or not these animal tests were unethical or if they were actually necessary to test for safe conditions for humans (I personally think the truth is somewhere in the middle, where we probably needed ape tests but I’m sure methodologies could have been better), but the one thing that wasn’t up for debate was the fact that every photo of chimpanzees in little space suits was pretty adorable.
As the Space Race escalated, both nations saw putting a man on the moon as the ultimate goal but getting there would take a lot of power. The gigantic displays of US and Soviet Rocket Engines highlighted both how massive the amount of force needed to leave the atmosphere really is. The engines also highlight what would be a key difference going forward, as the US favored bigger and more impressive engines while the USSR tried use smaller more resource-efficient engines in more elaborate groupings.
At first it really seemed like the Soviets could do no wrong. Shortly after the US successfully left the atmosphere at all, the Russians managed to actually hit the lunar surface. The metallic sphere they sent as a cosmic calling card (back up featured below) were designed to explode on impact scattering dozens of little Soviet pennants all over the moon’s surface just to taunt the Americans by being the first nation to create intergalactic litter.
Perhaps the strongest blow to the American ego came in April of 1961, when the Soviet Kosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to enter space and orbit the Earth, doing so in a ship called the Vostok 1 which looks like an absolute death trap. Miraculously, he survived and in doing so achieved immortality. With that, getting a man on the moon became the US’s only chance at besting the Soviets on anything space related because they had been trounced at every other milestone.
Fortunately this proved to be a classic Tortoise and the Hare style race, as all the Soviets’ monumental achievements really decimated their funding and resources. They didn’t have the infrastructure nor technology to build the kind of vessel that could carry someone to the moon and back, and the way their economic prospects were heading they didn’t seem likely to reach that point soon. Rather than admit any of that though, they treated their rocket plans as top secret refusing to talk to Kennedy about them in the hopes of stoking his fear and paranoia with the logic that “if they don’t want to talk about it, they must really close”. Privately though Krushchev wrote “Nothing to hide? It was just the opposite! We had NOTHING! and we had to hide it”. I feel like if you take out the hundreds of thousands of needless deaths, there’s just something more charmingly absurd about Cold War-era political intrigue and subterfuge that you don’t see any more. Maybe that’s just because that kind of stuff is too sad to be amusing when you’re actually living in it. The horrors of actually living in such a chaotic time and place were really well highlighted by a particularly spooky piece of the Berlin Wall.
While the USSR began to buckle under its own impending collapse, NASA scientists and astronauts finally got their big win with the Apollo 11 and its heroic crew. The momentous landing (or incredible Kubrik short film depending on who you ask) was honored with life size replicas of the Apollo ship and assorted authentic artifacts from both the ship and its crew. Seeing some astronaut suits that were actually worn on the moon was pretty mind-boggling.
Leaving the Space Race behind, the next gallery focused more on astronauts, life in space, and modern aerospace advancements, but the transition between the two sections of the museum was just stunning as you walked through a small toned corridor covered in backlit photos from outer space. It was mesmerizing in the best way.
While most of the focus was on US Astronauts, I thought it was very sweet that museum also had a lovely memorial for all the pioneering Kosmonauts and those that died trying, because they felt that it was important that neither their accomplishments nor their sacrifices should be diminished just because they happened to have been from a rival nation.
I loved seeing all the daily life items designed for astronauts, because even super mundane objects have to be so insanely well engineered to be safe and effective in the vacuum of outer space. All the dehydrated food looks like it would be a real challenge though for me personally. I did get a big kick out of Coca-Cola and Pepsi getting into a big fight over who got to be the official cola of NASA only for astronauts to discover that microgravity ruined the carbonation and both beverages tasted like garbage.
Perhaps my favorite part of the whole museum, because I am a child, was finally getting all my questions about peeing and pooing in space answered. I loved that NASA has to officially call what the astronauts wear waste Urine Transfer Systems and Defecation Collection devices because they were afraid it rob the “heroic” image of their astronauts of some of the majesty if they said that they basically had to wear diapers. My favorite thing to learn was that space ships do something called a Urine Purge where they just sort of dump all the pee they’ve collected into the void of space, and because it’s so cold out there the Pee crystalizes and its supposedly one of the most oddly beautiful things to be hold with the first astronauts to observe it nicknaming the shimmering piss cloud “Urion” after the constellation. I say “supposedly” because the astronauts were actually expressly told not to take any photographs of the urine purge because in the 60s newspapers weren’t allowed to print the word urine so they wouldn’t be able to publicly address what the photos were if they were taken. I also got a big kick out of the almost sitcom-like nature of the Gemini-VII Mission in which two astronauts spent 14 days alone in space testing out different hygiene products, foods, and waste removal devices to basically troubleshoot all of those daily living areas for future astronauts. It’s the most unglamorously heroic mission I’ve ever heard of because you know they had to have gone freaking insane dealing with terrible dry foods, leaky urine collection devices, and cramped quarters for two weeks. I think the two men actually got along pretty well but they’re on the record as simply saying the last few days “got bad” which I am beyond fascinated with.
With Sally Ride trailblazing through NASA’s gender barrier, she made a giant leap for womankind and also for NASA’s knowledge of life in space because as the museum neatly highlighted, it wasn’t until a woman entered space that mostly male NASA scientists neglected several important questions like say the physics of long hair in zero gravity. I don’t mean to reduce other actual scientific accomplishments of female astronauts to space-grooming, but I just think if society were to ever leave Earth these seemingly trivial things could become much bigger problems if not addressed. I like it as an illustration of how you if you always look at things from one perspective you’ll never be able to solve the things you can’t even see.
Lastly we had some more more giant vessels from the slightly more modern era (don’t let the CCCP sticker fool ya) for one last wow before you leave.
Coming back down to earth, I needed a bit more energy for my next two hour stretch of driving to my Air BnB so I stopped to get a coffee in the small town of Salina at a place called Moka’s Coffee. While I only went in for regular coffee, they were known for their specialty drinks so I went full decadent and got a frozen frappe called the Kahlua Mudslide, which had kahlua, Irish cream (both flavors not actual liqueurs), chocolate sauce, and coffee all blended together. It was one of the finest milkshakes I’ve ever had and a neat little caffeine boost to boot.
My AirBnB was a cute little farmers’ hostel but I passed out pretty much as soon as I hit the bed so if there was a social scene there at all I missed out on it which is shame, but it was a damn comfy bed.
Favorite Random Sightings: Old Time Clock Shop (cute name); Hair House (gross name); Woooo Fashion (Wild name); A sign outside Taco Rio proclaiming “We accept expired Taco Rio coupons” (It’s an insane business model but I hope it works for them)
Regional Observations: People say “roof” like “ruff” and it’s the clearest sign of an accent I’ve noticed
Albums Listened To: Victory Lap by Propgandhi (really good hearted Canadian punks still trying to save the world 20 years in, don’t always love the music but I find it oddly inspiring); Vocal Studies and Uprock Narratives by Prefuse 73 (just Black List because it has MF Doom and Aesop Rock on it); Voi-la Intruder by Gogol Bordello (their debut album!); Volume 1 by the Big Ol’ Nasty Getdown (a funk supergroup comprised of members of Parliament, Fishbone, Bootsy’s Rubber Band, and many more!)
People’s Favorite Jokes: (sadly I lost my document with all of these on it when my phone from this trip died so it’s gonna be random ones from the internet from here on out)
A guy sees a sign in front of a house: "Talking Dog for Sale." He rings the bell and the owner tells him the dog is in the backyard.
The guy goes into the backyard and sees a black mutt just sitting there.
"You talk?" he asks.
"Yep," the mutt replies.
"So, what's your story?"
The mutt looks up and says, "Well, I discovered my gift of talking pretty young and I wanted to help the government, so I told the CIA about my gift, and in no time they had me jetting from country to country, sitting in rooms with spies and world leaders, because no one figured a dog would be eavesdropping. I was one of their most valuable spies eight years running.
The jetting around really tired me out, and I knew I wasn't getting any younger and I wanted to settle down. So I signed up for a job at the airport to do some undercover security work, mostly wandering near suspicious characters and listening in. I uncovered some incredible dealings there and was awarded a batch of medals. Had a wife, a mess of puppies, and now I'm just retired."
The guy is amazed. He goes back in and asks the owner what he wants for the dog.
The owner says, "Ten dollars."
The guy says, "This dog is amazing. Why on earth are you selling him, so cheap?"
The owner replies, "He's just a big liar. He didn't do any of that stuff."
Songs of the Day:
aggressive music with a weirdly sweet core
a great jazzy hidden gem
a very pro-immigrant punk dance party
Keep it funky y’all