Word: space
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Along the vast greensward that sweeps from the foot of Capitol Hill to the Washington Monument, there glitters the newest star of the Smithsonian Institution. The National Air and Space Museum (NASM), a huge, elegant hangar designed by St. Louis Architect Gyo Obata, is a cathedral to man's fascination with flight. Surfaced in pink Tennessee marble and bronze-tinted glass, the museum houses many of the great artifacts of aviation and space travel in a three-story structure 680 ft. long. A Washington rarity in that it was finished on time and within the $40 million budget...
Other sure eye-catchers are Collins' own spacecraft and the Friendship Seven Mercury capsule that carried John Glenn on the first U.S. orbital flight. Perhaps the most appealing exhibit in the Space Hall, another of the great bays, is the massive black and gold Skylab space station. The only bottleneck in the building is at Skylab's narrow portal, where crowds line up to enter. Says Collins...
...There is still more. A rather unnerving audio-visual display of how modern air traffic controllers work. A film called To Fly-so realistic that some viewers get airsick. Said a former Navy pilot: "My God, I'm getting vertigo." A life-size model of the Soviet Soyuz space vehicle coupled to an Apollo capsule for a display of the 1975 joint space venture. Also, of course, a model of Sputnik, the satellite that helped to goose America into space...
...each successive modern war, the competition in technology becomes more fierce-and more effective. The splitting of the atom and the exploring of space bear witness to the stimulus of competition, the convergence of efforts, the involuntary collaboration of wartime enemies. Technology is the natural foe of nationalism...
...machine, adjusted, focused and preselected for his private taste. CB radio now has begun to provide every citizen with his own broadcasting and receiving station. Each of us will be in danger of being suffocated by our own tastes. Moreover, these devices that enlarge our sight and vision in space seem somehow to imprison us in the present. The electronic technology that reaches out instantaneously over the continents does very little to help us cross the centuries...