One Small Step...

Look! I'm on the Moon! Well, not really. I'm at the Pima Air & Space Museum in Tucson, Arizona. They opened up the special Moon Room just so I could get my picture taken with the Earth in the background.  If you like airplanes and space craft, you’ll like this place.

In the Space Gallery Exhibit, there’s a lot of fun stuff to crawl around in. I had great fun pretending I was an Apollo astronaut. You can see history of the experimental planes from the X-1 (broke the sound barrier) to the X-45 (a hypersonic test plane), The Space Race to the Moon and you can follow the water on Mars.

There are five exhibits: The Main Hanger, Hanger 3, Hanger 4, Space Gallery and then Outside has all kinds of planes sitting right there for you to walk up and touch.

Here I am in the Main Hanger reenacting Slim Picken's scene from Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. I forgot my cowboy hat though.

The B57 was designed as a tactical strike bomb and depth charge that could be dropped by aircraft moving at a high rate of speed. Production of the bomb began in 1963 and it remained in service until the early 1990s. The basic bomb weighs about 500 lbs and produced a blast in the 5-20 kiloton range depending on the warhead.

So basically, you'd want to be far, far away if it went off.

The people are very nice at the Pima Air & Space Museum. They let me perform an inspection of this jet turbine. Since I’m so small, I was able to get inside and let them know that everything was A-OK.

I even checked out the Stealth Bomber! Maybe when I grow up I can be one of their mechanics.

Outside, you never know what airplanes you might see. I had to have my picture taken with this retired plane! That’s right, Air Force One! Now I'm going to have to get my mom and dad to take me to the Reagan Library so I can go inside an Air Force One!

Do you think they would let a little guy like me be the pilot on Air Force One?