Well I finally had a job last week. Don't get me wrong, it was awesome being home for a month, being with my family, working out, gathering and cutting wood for the winter. But I definitely appreciate the balance in my life of being domestic then being on the road then being domestic then being on the road, etc. etc.
My work was actually in Ridgecrest, California. Normally I'd fly into Las Vegas and drive through Death Valley, and I was actually looking forward to it as it's one of my favorite drives and I haven't been out that way yet this year. But then I noticed on the map that if I flew into LA instead, I'd drive right through Mojave on the way to work.
Mojave Air & Space Port is of course the home of Scaled Composites, who are famous for being the design team behind SpaceShipOne, the craft which won them the Ansari X Prize for being the first company to successfully launch a privately funded, manned space flight.
And there it is. Actually it's a replica, which irritates me. The original is hanging in the Smithsonian's National Air And Space Museum right next to the Spirit of St. Louis. I was there a few years back and saw it, but it seems like it should be at Mojave, the site of it's triumph.
The other thing that irritated me is that if it's a replica, why do they shut it in a glass tomb that you're not allowed to go in? Hard to get a decent picture on a sunny day. I guess I can console myself with the HDR shots that make reflections look somewhat arty, where no art credits are deserved.
I took the 5 dollar tour of the airfield. There was no other space related stuff that I saw out there, but I saw Scaled Composite's work hangar, though it was closed. They are currently working on SpaceShipTwo in there. Which will be test flown at Mojave until it's ready for its first commercial spaceflight. Which will take place at Spaceport America in New Mexico. Which is currently under construction where I went and blogged about a few months back. It's the circle of messiestobjects, man.
Exciting, right? But what was cool about the tour is that the airport actually serves as a dumping ground for planes. Whenever airlines want to retire a plane or just store one somewhere for a while, Mojave is one of the places they do it at. Their HUGE plane yard was full of old wrecks, planes used for spare parts, and planes on sabbatical. It was totally wild and a photo shoot there would yield some fascinating gains, no question. But I wasn't allowed to take pictures, it was screamingly frustrating. Apparently the airlines don't like pictures of wrecked planes and whatnot circulating around out there because they feel its bad for their image, which is silly of course. However you know how they won't show movies on planes about bad things happening to planes, so they are famously touchy about that stuff after all.
I snuck that one photo after the tour from the road with my telephoto, which tells you nothing about how awesome the place really was. Those are resting planes, you can't even see the junkers unless you're deep in Mojave airport territory. One really fun thing about the tour: there was this couple who were on it with me and the guy was a huge plane nerd. He recognized all the different types and was ohhing and ahhing and saying stuff like "Check out that old 7blah blah something 7 fuselage just lying there! Awesome!" or "Man, I haven't seen one of those engines in years!" And his wife, who was less technically savvy was nonetheless as weird about it as he was. She was into them for different reasons: "I love those old USAir planes! I prefer the old color scheme to their new one." Or, "Oooh! There's an old Continental! Those are my favorites" (She declared those old Continentals to be her favorites at least 4 times) Or, upon seing an old Aloha Air (which no longer exists) plane; "Wow, look at the artwork on that tailfin! It looks so 70's, very groovy!" It was hysterical, but I couldn't laugh because they were very serious about it. It was like they were birdwatching and going nuts over the plummage.
Anyway, after Mojave, and on my way back to LA after completeing my work in Ridgecrest, my flight home on Saturday morning was cancelled due to Hurricane Irene. It took me hours to get someone at the airline on the phone to reschedule, and by the time I did the earliest they could get me home was Tuesday. Stuck in LA for 3 days! LA kind of sucks. I'll get to that in another post.
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