#Air & Space museum

[pointandshooter]

National Air and Space Museum, Dulles, Virginia

photo: David Castenson

[nocternalrandomness]

A B-36 Peacemaker Bomber on display at the Pima Air & Space Museum in Tucson, Arizona

[vulcanette]

[commodorez]

Me sitting in the Mercury capsule mockup at the San Diego Air & Space Museum

[faeriekit]

Health and Hybrids (VIII)👽👻💚

[I can't remember the original prompt posters  for the life of me but here's a mashup between a cryptid!Danny, presumed-alien!Danny, dp x dc, and whatever prompt made the one body horror meat grinder fic.]

PART ONE is here PART TWOis here PART THREEis here PART FOUR is here and PART FIVE is here PART SIX is here and PART SEVEN is here and this is part 8 💚 Ao3 Is here for all parts

Where we last left off... Everybody got lunch! Not Danny, though. :) He was taking a nap. And Wonder Woman

Trigger warnings for this story:  body horror | gore | post-dissection fic | dehumanization (probably) |  my awful attempts at following DC canon. On with the show.

💚👻👽👻💚

Danny only doesn’t throw something because he already knew someone was on their way. The alien told him so. It’s not a surprise.

There’s someone new here. In his room. At the edge of his curtain. Too close to his bed. Danny doesn’t like it. He doesn’t hiss, because that’s Rude, but he does push his shadow to be bigger. Longer. Darker.

The human just waves. Waits. Holds something out in its hand. Danny doesn’t care. He can’t see it and he’s not going to go over there.

The human makes more words Danny can’t hear. Blech. He wonders what everyone knows here that he doesn’t. Is it French? Is it German? Jazz—

Thinking about Jazz makes his heart hurt.

Danny curls up further into the dark spots on his bed.

The human steps past Danny’s curtain. Danny does hiss, now, something long and low and halfway out of a human hearing range.

The human pauses. Its black haired-head tilts. It says—something else. Its tone is still gentle.

Danny doesn’t trust it. But it doesn’t get any closer, either. It only…holds out a hand.

There’s something in that hand.

It’s a trap, it has to be. But—

The alien said that they had friends in this tower. That the humans here are…safe. Danny doesn’t believe it. Danny is afraid to believe it.

But one of them gave him food.

…And the younger ones feed him all the time.

So maybe. Danny. Maybe he can. He flinches and he leans forward.

Danny can. He can’t see most things. But something aches in his skull where he is meant to see color and shape and familiarity, and something in his melted brain whispers wait, watch.

Danny’s back arches.

He waits. He watches.

…The object doesn’t do anything. The human simply sets it on Danny’s side table, and then it’s an object. A mostly white, somewhat red object. The other colors might be blue, or gray; they’re not distinct enough to be distinguishable in Danny’s mostly mush eyes. It’s oblong, and sort of round and—

Danny jerks upright. He snatches the item off of the table as quickly as he can, brings it as close to his eyes as he can— IT’S A ROCKET!!!! It is!!!! With fuel thrusters and everything!! If Danny had his whole brain he thinks that he could even recognize which one!!

He purrs, and he purrs, and he purrs, and he takes his pillow and he settles the hard plastic into his kind-of-damp (but mostly dry!) pillows and leans into it, happy to have this thing he likes and can recognize!!

Fine. Danny can like this human. When it comes back with little pills in a paper cup, it bravely gets closer, so Danny can see black hair pulled back, a tail swinging behind her, a tinge of red under a mostly-opaque white medical gown, and gold bracelets on her arms.

…Danny touches the bracelets to investigate before he can even be scared. They shiver with energy. Danny’s fragile form shivers back.

The human spends a lot of time with words Danny can’t hear on the paper cup, and she pulls out each little pill inside so that she can say more things, show him what it looks like, let him smell each capsule and tablet.

When the buzzing human comes back with a vibrato of joycurio/us!/joy in its wake, eager to see Danny as he is relieved to see it, Danny shows him the little paper cup.

The buzzing human trills with relief! Relief! Relief!

…That’s got to be safe enough, right? …Right?

Danny…

It’s been a while since he tried to dry-swallow medicine down his torn esophagus, but everyone’s immediate rush to find him water makes the swallow easier than Danny might have thought.

Some of the medicine is going to make him sleepy. Danny remembers enough about medicine to remember that. The thought of being vulnerable and not able to wake up is scary; but if Danny is going to get better, he’s going to have to trust that not every human wants to make sample slides out of his organs and jam needle-long electrodes into his brain, and he will have to fall asleep and not cry about it.

The cup of water the quickquickquick human gets him is so nice. His claws clink against the ceramic of the mug. Most of the liquid actually makes it into his mouth, and some of it even into his throat.

Danny lays down, pulls the rocket ship closer to his fragile form, and purrs. The fastquick human takes Danny’s hand so that he’s not alone.

At some point, his paper eyelids shut.

[t13shoots]

[istandonsnowpiles]

Discovery and Concorde at Udvar-Hazy

[steelbluehome]

Pics from Bucky Barnes in the Smithsonian Museum Fan Theory on Mediachomp

You should go there and read the fan theory, it makes sense to me.

[7itch0zero]

[beardedmrbean]

[accessibleaesthetics]

Earlier this year, I went to Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, and I was struck by who I saw using some of the accessibility features of the exhibits.

[Image Description: Photo of the Command Module Columbia exhibit at Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. The command module, which sits behind glass, is a full-size truncated cone with a docking probe and dish-shaped aft heat shield. In front of the glass is a sign with information about the command module on the left, a photograph in the middle, and a labeled smaller model on the right. The smaller model is labeled in both slightly raised text and Braille, and has a slightly raised hand icon next to it inside of a yellow speech bubble. End Image Description.]

This exhibit, like several others, included a part of the sign you were supposed to touch, as indicated by the hand symbol. This meant that people who couldn't see the actual thing behind the glass could get a very good idea of what every part of it looked like by touching the model and reading the label, which was offered in both raised letters and Braille.

[Image Description: Close up of the right side of the exhibit sign from the previous image. The light shining on the black surface of the exhibit sign shows darker spots where people left fingerprints. The entire Braille label is a near solid dark spot. End Image Description.]

This is obviously very cool and it's great that they invested inclusive design. But what really struck me about this was how much it was being used. You can tell from the photo that the Braille part of the sign has had many fingers on it, but I don't actually think all of those were from members of the target audience.

I could be wrong, of course, you can never really tell if someone is blind or low vision simply by looking at them. But I saw multiple children come up and run their hands over the smaller model mounted to the sign. At least one of them was running their fingers along the Braille too.

And it wasn't just children either. I saw at least one adult (other than myself) interacting with a similar model in another exhibit, one of a footprint on the moon. This one openly encouraged you to touch it rather than just implying permission like the one in this picture did. And that got me thinking: how many more adults would be doing the same thing the kids were if they weren't held back by this unspoken "oh, this feature is not for me" assumption? There are many haptic learners out there, after all.

If the people who design these museums realized the potential for a curb cut effect here, how many more exhibits would have these features?

And having full three-dimensional modules for people to touch weren't the only thing this museum offered either. You don't have to have all that to make the sign more user-friendly to those who have trouble seeing it.

[Image Description: A sign with a two-dimensional diagram of the Blériot XI aircraft. Each part of the illustration, including the person next to it for size, is slightly raised off the surface of the sign. All words on the diagram are labeled in both raised text and Braille. Beside the diagram is a slightly raised hand icon next to it inside of a yellow speech bubble. The labeled parts are the front, propeller, rudder, and elevator, most of which have arrows pointing to the respective parts of the illustration. End Image Description.]

You can make two-dimensional diagrams accessible too.

Finally, as an aside, the videos at the exhibits, the ones you could play on your own, all had open captions, and at least one had open audio descriptions as well.

[pointandshooter]

When I was a kid I used to build model airplanes and hang them from my bedroom ceiling.

Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, Virginia

photos: David Castenson

[nocternalrandomness]

Bell X-1 'Glamorous Glennis' at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Washington DC

[lonestarflight]

Boeing 307 Stratoliner at the Pima County Air Museum, later Pima Air & Space Museum, in Tucson, Arizona.

Date: February 1970

SDASM Archives: 72694621

[sea-changed]

"At the time of bombing, a woman was 17, and she suffered a severe thigh bone fracture. So she was unable to walk. She spent her whole life in a wheelchair, and when she turned 76, she quickly developed severe anemia, and she became very weak. "We examined her blood and found that acute leukemia was quickly growing inside her body. Then she said to me, ‘I have long believed the atomic bomb was living, surviving inside.’ Maybe she had a feeling that the atomic bomb had entered her body. She didn’t use ‘radiation’ — a special term, ‘radiation.’ But she said, ‘The atomic bomb entered me and survived until now.’”

The Last Survivors Speak. It’s Time to Listen.

By Kathleen Kingsbury, W.J. Hennigan and Spencer Cohen Photographs by Kentaro Takahashi Aug. 6, 2024

The waiting room of the Red Cross hospital in downtown Hiroshima is always crowded. Nearly every available seat is occupied, often by elderly people waiting for their names to be called. Many of these men and women don’t have typical medical histories, however. They are the surviving victims of the American atomic bomb attack 79 years ago.

Not many Americans have Aug. 6 circled on their calendars, but it’s a day that the Japanese can’t forget. Even now, the hospital continues to treat, on average, 180 survivors — known as hibakusha — of the blasts each day.

When the United States dropped an atomic weapon on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, the entire citizenries of both countries were working feverishly to win World War II. For most Americans, the bomb represented a path to victory after nearly four relentless years of battle and a technological advance that would cement the nation as a geopolitical superpower for generations. Our textbooks talk about the world’s first use of a nuclear weapon.

Many today in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the United States detonated a bomb just three days later, talk about how those horrible events must be the last uses of nuclear weapons.

The bombs killed an estimated 200,000 men, women and children and maimed countless more. In Hiroshima 50,000 of the city’s 76,000 buildings were completely destroyed. In Nagasaki nearly all homes within a mile and a half of the blast were wiped out. In both cities the bombs wrecked hospitals and schools. Urban infrastructure collapsed.

Americans didn’t dwell on the devastation. Here the bombings were hailed as necessary and heroic acts that brought the war to an end. In the days immediately after the nuclear blasts, the polling firm Gallup found that 85 percent of Americans approved of the decision to drop atomic bombs over Japan. Even decades later the narrative of military might — and American sacrifice — continued to reign.

For the 50th anniversary of the war’s end, the Smithsonian buckled to pressure from veterans and their families and scaled back a planned exhibition that would have offered a more nuanced portrait of the conflict, including questioning the morality of the bomb. The Senate even passed a resolution calling the Smithsonian exhibition “revisionist and offensive” and declared it must “avoid impugning the memory of those who gave their lives for freedom.”

In Japan, however, the hibakusha and their offspring have formed the backbone of atomic memory. Many see their life’s work as informing the wider world about what it’s like to carry the trauma, stigma and survivor’s guilt caused by the bombs, so that nuclear weapons may never be used again. Their urgency to do so has only increased in recent years. With an average age of 85, the hibakusha are dying by the hundreds each month — just as the world is entering a new nuclear age.

Countries like the United States, China and Russia are spending trillions of dollars to modernize their stockpiles. Many of the safeguards that once lowered nuclear risk are unraveling, and the diplomacy needed to restore them is not happening. The threat of another blast can’t be relegated to history.

And so, as another anniversary of Aug. 6 passes, it is necessary for Americans — and the globe, really — to listen to the stories of the few human beings who can still speak to the horror nuclear weapons can inflict before this approach is taken again.

Chieko Kiriake was on a break from her job at a tobacco factory in Hiroshima. She was 15 years old.

"Everything was burned. People were walking around with their clothes burned off, their hair singed and standing on end. Their faces were swollen, so much so that you couldn’t tell who was who. Their lips were swollen too, too swollen to speak. Their skin would fall right off and hang off their hands at the fingernails, like an inside-out glove, all black from the mud and ash. It was almost like they had black seaweed hanging from their hands.

"But I was thankful that some of my classmates were alive, that they were able to make their way back.

"Swarms of flies came and laid eggs in the burns, which would hatch, and the larvae would start squirming inside the skin. They couldn’t stand the pain. They’d cry and plead, ‘Get these maggots out of my skin.’

"The maggots would feast on the blood and pus and get so plump and squirm. I didn’t dare use my bare hands, so I brought my chopsticks and picked them out one by one. But they kept hatching inside the skin. I spent hours picking those maggots out of my classmates.”

Hiroe Kawashimo’s mother was at homein Hiroshima. She was born eight months later.

On Aug. 6, 1945, Hiroe Kawashimo wasn’t yet born. She was in utero; her mother was around 1 kilometer from ground zero when she was exposed to the bomb’s radiation in Hiroshima. Ms. Kawashimo was born several months later, weighing 500 grams, according to her mother — apparently so small, she could fit in a rice bowl. She was one of numerous children exposed to the bomb while in utero and diagnosed with microcephaly, a smaller head.

Seiji Takato was at home with his mother in Hiroshima. He was 4 years old.

"I remember the burnt smell. I was 4 years old. And I don’t really remember the immediate symptoms. But some years later, I had boils on my legs, and they didn’t heal for a long time. That made me really hate going to school. Later the lymph nodes in my armpits and legs swelled up, and I had to have them cut open three times.”

Seiichiro Mise was at home in Nagasaki playing the organ, mimicking the sounds of B-29 bombers. He was 10 years old.

"I got married in 1964. At the time, people would say that if you married an atomic bomb survivor, any kids you had would be deformed.

"Two years later, I got a call from the hospital saying my baby had been born. But on my way, my heart was troubled. I’m an atomic bomb victim. I experienced that black rain. So I felt anguished. Usually new parents simply ask the doctor, ‘Is it a boy or girl?’ I didn’t even ask that. Instead, I asked, ‘Does my baby have 10 fingers and 10 toes?’

The doctor looked unsettled. But then he smiled and said it was a healthy boy. I was relieved.”

Kunihiko Sakuma was at home with his mother in Hiroshima. He was 9 months old.

"There are people today who still find it difficult to talk about what they experienced. It could be their advanced age, or they don’t feel up to it physically. Often they just don’t feel well, even though they don’t know why.

"So I’d ask them, ‘By the way, where were you during the bombing?’ People died or got sick not just right after the bombing. The reality is, their symptoms are emerging even today, 79 years later.

"I thought all this was in the past. But as I started talking to survivors, I realized their suffering was still ongoing.

"The atomic bomb is such an inhumane weapon, and the effects of radiation stay with survivors for a very long time. That’s why they need our continued support.”

Minoru Hataguchi’s mother was at home. His father was at work next to Hiroshima Station and never came home. He was born seven months later.

"For the first time, at 21, I was officially recognized as an atomic bomb survivor.

"But I hated that. Why should I be labeled a survivor, when I was born the year after the bomb, 20 kilometers away from the epicenter?

"I hated even looking at the Atomic Bomb Survivor’s Health Handbook, and I quickly put it away in my desk drawer. I didn’t want the discrimination, and I didn’t want the pity. Until I was in my 50s, I didn’t tell anyone that I was a survivor.”

Now a doctor, Masao Tomonaga was asleep on the second floor of his home in Nagasaki at the time of the bombing. He was 2 years old.

"At the time of bombing, a woman was 17, and she suffered a severe thigh bone fracture. So she was unable to walk. She spent her whole life in a wheelchair, and when she turned 76, she quickly developed severe anemia, and she became very weak.

"We examined her blood and found that acute leukemia was quickly growing inside her body. Then she said to me, ‘I have long believed the atomic bomb was living, surviving inside.’ Maybe she had a feeling that the atomic bomb had entered her body. She didn’t use ‘radiation’ — a special term, ‘radiation.’ But she said, ‘The atomic bomb entered me and survived until now.’”

Shigeaki Mori was crossing a bridge on his way to school in Hiroshima. His wife, Kayoko, is also a survivor. He was 8 years old; she was 3 years old.

"People still don’t get it. The atomic bomb isn’t a simple weapon. I speak as someone who suffers until this day: The world needs to stop nuclear war from ever happening again. But when I turn on the news, I see politicians talk about deploying more weapons, more tanks. How could they? I wish for the day they stop that.”

Keiko Ogura was standing on a road near her home in Hiroshima. She was 8 years old.

"As survivors, we cannot do anything but tell our story. ‘For we shall not repeat the evil’ — this is the pledge of survivors. Until we die, we want to tell our story, because it’s difficult to imagine.

"Now what survivors worry about is to die and meet our family in heaven. I heard many survivors say, ‘What shall I do? On this planet there are still many many nuclear weapons, and then I’ll meet my daughter I couldn’t save. I’ll be asked: Mom, what did you do to abolish nuclear weapons?’

"There is no answer I can tell them.”

A small pink booklet fits squarely in Shigeaki Mori’s breast pocket — a cherished possession that over the years has become more closely tied to his self-identity. The Atomic Bomb Survivor’s Health Handbook grants him access to free medical checkups and treatment, which at age 87 is critical. Flip open the first page to see his distance from the bomb when it detonated that bright August morning and flip another page to begin tracing years of his health history, written in neat rows of Japanese script.

Barack Obama was the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima, in 2016 — in sharp contrast to the regular visits of American leaders to Europe to commemorate major battles there. Mr. Mori was one of two survivors who spoke briefly with Mr. Obama after his remarks, leading to an emotional embrace between the two men.

On his living room wall, Mr. Mori proudly displays a photograph of that moment, alongside dozens of other mementos — including a photo with the pope — from his work over decades to remind the world of what happened in Hiroshima. Many Japanese hoped Mr. Obama’s visit would bring an official apology for the bombings; it did not. The president, however, did not shy away from recognizing the destruction of that day.

The camphor trees at Sanno Shrine in Nagasaki survived the bombing and continue to grow.

“We stand here, in the middle of this city, and force ourselves to imagine the moment the bomb fell. We force ourselves to feel the dread of children confused by what they see. We listen to a silent cry,” Mr. Obama said. “Mere words cannot give voice to such suffering, but we have a shared responsibility to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again.”

He recognized that voices like Mr. Mori’s are fleeting. “Someday the voices of the hibakusha will no longer be with us to bear witness,” Mr. Obama said. “But the memory of the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, must never fade. That memory allows us to fight complacency. It fuels our moral imagination. It allows us to change.”

The Smithsonian is in the midst of planning an exhibition on World War II, with a spotlight on the two bombed cities. It’s time for the next generation to bear witness and demand change.

[hyper-coasters]

Blue Angels. Udvar-Hazey Smithsonian Hangar, 2024.