Wisconsin Journal

Number 21

5 March 1998



It's official: we definitely got a mild winter. The state meterologist

has pronounced it the warmest winter in Wisconsin since 1895. Virtually

all the snow melted around here by the last week in February. We wake

up some mornings still to a dusting of snow on the ground, but it

doesn't last through the day. The lakes have all been pronounced

off limits because the ice is getting mushy. I did manage to get the kids

out onto Lake Monona while it was still frozen hard, and there

was an iceboat race on it a couple weekends ago. There have been

several drownings around the state from people going through the ice.



[This just in: Winter has returned. Got about six inches of snow

and heavy winds on Sunday, and temperatures haven't gotten above

freezing since. Should hit 2 tonight.]



On a recent Wednesday trip, Kaye and I headed northest to Watertown.

It straddles the Rock River, and has business districts on both

sides. The river actually makes a loop around the town (which

got me disoriented while driving, since I came upon the river

in front of me when I was sure it was behind me). The river drops

an appreciable amount in this loop, so Watertown was the site of

several water-powered mills. There are still quite a few industrial

buildings along the river, some of which have been converted to

other uses. There was a brickworks in town at one point, which left

a legacy of lots of beige-brick buildings. There are 5-6 grand old

churches around downtown (mostly brick), including a Moravian church.

(The Moravian Church got its start in Bohemia over 500 years ago,

spliting off from the Catholic church even before the Lutherans.

There are only about 100,000 members in the US, so I was surprised

to see such a large church.) The town has a substantial

German heritage, and was the site of the first Kindergarten in the US.

We drove up to see an interesting octagonal house, of a style popular

after the Civil War, on a hill at one side of town. It hasn't opened

for the season yet, but we could walk around the grounds.



Given that it's my sabbatical, I gave myself some time off from a

recent conference I attended in Orlando to go visit the Kennedy

Space Center. On the drive over to the coast I passed an Oscar Mayer

Weinermobile, and saw an area with a twisted up highway sign and

a bunch of uprooted trees, possibly the result of the tornados a

few days before.



The launch pads and buildings occupy very little of the land set

aside for the space center. Part of the land appears to be an old

orange grove, but most of it is a nature preserve in its natural

state. Saw lots of birds, including a snowy egret, and also an

alligator, lounging in a lagoon near the central museum complex,

kept company by some big box turtles.



The space center has changed a lot since I last visited (8-9 years

ago?), and is starting to resemble the theme parks that dot central

Florida. I guess the difference is that you are seeing the real

thing, rather than some kind of reconstruction. The central complex

is free, but I paid my $14 to take a bus tour of the center.



We first went past the Vehicle Assembly Building, which at 525 ft.

high has doors tall enough to admit the Statue of Liberty, should

she ever decide to vacation down that way. The VAB is where the Apollo/

Saturn missions were assembled, and where stages of solid rocket

boosters are now assembled, then mated to the shuttle and its external

fuel tank, by means of a 250-ton crane. The result is a 3-million-

pound launch vehicle on a 6-million-ton assembly platform, which has

to be moved 3 miles to one of the launchpads. The assembly is moved

by a tracked transport vehicle that is a piece of converted strip-mining

equipment. NASA bought two of them for $500 million dollars in the

sixties. Each moves at a top speed of about 1 mile an hour and gets

about 30 ft. to the gallon. They move down a crawler-way made of crushed

rock going down 7 feet. Near this area is the building where shuttles

and their engines are overhauled after missions, and also the launch-

control center.



We continued on to a viewing tower, getting a glimpse of Air Force

Launch Complex 41, where most US satellites are launched, atop Titan

missles. That area is not called Cape Kennedy, but rather Cape

Canaveral Air Force Station. There are four enormous lighting rods

mounted on derricks around it.



>From the viewing tower we could see pads 39-A&B, where all the Apollo

missions went up, and where all the shuttle launches take place.

Pad 39-A is where Apollo 11 went up, the first mission to land on

the moon. It will also be the site on April 16 of the 90th shuttle

launch. Each pad has a pair huge spherical tanks about a mile from

it in either direction, for liquid oxygen and hydrogen, which is what

the shuttle main engines burn. Each also contains a huge gantry that

can be pivoted into place to give access to the shuttle cargo pay.

The gantry actually contains a clean room that seals onto the shuttle

so that the payload can be accessed without contamination. The

observation tower is built around a shuttle main engine, which

stands two stories high. There was also a video about shuttle launches

at that site. If you've ever watched TV coverage of a launch, you

may have see a camera shot from below, looking across one of the

engine nozzles. Right before ignition you see what appears to be

several sparklers go off, followed by streams of water. What they

actually are is sparklers and streams of water. The sparklers are

to burn off any escaped hydrogen gas, while the water is for noise

damping. The acoustical engery of the engines would damage the shuttle

itself if not attenuated.



On the way from the tower to the next stop, we saw the Mate-Demate

Facility in the distance. The MDF is used to lift the shuttle on to

or off of a special Boeing 747, in case it has been flown in from

a California landing or is taken out for factory service. We also

drove past the VIP and press stands, where I noticed that CNN and

Reuters have permanent news trailers installed.



The next stop is a new building housing an entire Saturn rocket and

Apollo payload. Last time I was there, the rocket was sitting outside

at the central complex, rusting away. It's now been fixed up and

is protected indoors. The building also houses the actual consoles

from the firing control room used for the Apollo missions, which

is now used to similuate a launch. The most interesting thing for me

was noticing that there were very few CRTs. I only saw four, and one

of those actually seemed to be a heart monitor display. Most of the

consoles were just switches and indicator lights. At the front of

the firing room were a bank of vertial printers and plotters. I noticed

binolculars at several stations in the back, which the operators

presumably used to read the printouts at the front of the room.



All the different stages and modules were disconnected and suspended

from the ceiling, so you could get a good look at each. The Saturn

first stage was made by Boeing, and is essentially two giant tanks

(for kerosene and liquid oxygen) and five massive engines. The second

stage burned lox and hydrogen, and had five smaller engines. The

third stage used the same fuel, but only had one engine. The lunar

module and service module burnt more exotic stuff: hydrazine,

nitrogen tetroxide and unsymmetric dimethyl hydrazine. The actual

lunar lander for Apollo 18 was on display (missions 18-20 were

cancelled).



The last stop on the bus tour was the Space Station Processing Facility.

Here you could take a bridge to another building and see actual

preparations taking place. The SSPF is located in the former training

center for Apollo astronauts (shuttle crews train in Houston), and

is where shuttle payloads are prepared and modules for the international

space station will be prepared for launch. The facility has a metal

framework that matches the dimensions of the shuttle cargo bay, so

contractors can be sure that payloads will actually fit.



Back at the central complex, I took a quick tour of the "missle garden",

where HBO happended to be filming some kind of promotion that day.

I also visited a couple of the exhibit buildings, where I saw a

Mercury capsule and the Coke/Diet-Coke service module that rode on

one of the shuttle missions. Imagine what it's like if the bubbles

go up your nose in space.



The other high point of my Florida trip was seeing the Phineas Phogg

tavern in downtown Orlando, where Charles Barkley recently defenestrated

another patron who was giving him a hard time.





Sighted around town:



For Valentine's Day, Community Pharmacy downtown had a window display

featuring a vibrator on a cake stand, with several kinds of edible

lotions around it.



Saw the "Emergency Lake Rescue Vehicle" parked outside the downtown

fire station. It's an ATV with chains on the wheels and two metal

canisters that act as floatation devices. I presume it's meant to

rescue people on *frozen* lakes. (If you take your snowmobile on

any of the lakes in Madison, it must have flotation devices. It's

not for your safety, they just don't want sunken snowmobiles leaking

oil and gas. Sunken snowmobilers, on the other hand, are taken care of

by the fish.)



A standard way for student organizations to advertise their campus

events is to make signs with chalk on campus walkways. Tells you how

much it rains around here during the school year.



Wisconsin Weirdness:



Foamation Inc., manufacturers of Wisconsin Cheeseheads, now make a

Cheesehead toilet seat and Cheesehead toilet paper. The toilet paper

has "darker smudges" to simulate Swiss-cheese holes.



An Eau Claire woman killed her boyfriend after the Superbowl. Jason

Hollister and his girlfriend were driving home from a tavern after the

football game when his truck got stuck in a ditch. His girlfriend

freed the truck after half an hour, but immediately got it stuck in

the ditch on the other side of the road. Hollister got mad and started

walking away down the middle of the road. His girlfriend freed the

truck and drove over him. She was ticketed for driving while intoxicated.



A man from Belleville was driving his snowmobile at 80 miles an hour

when he hit a dip. He hurtled 136 feet through the air, according to

the sheriff's office, breaking some ribs when he landed. There is no

law against drunken snowmobile driving in Wisconsin.



A snowmobiler from Winneconne was racing three other drivers down a

trail when his throttle stuck. He was unable to brake, and did not

have the cut-off lanyard around his wrist. He sped across Highway B,

passing between two large bales of hay on the other side. His luck

ran out when he clipped a fence and was thrown loose. The snowmobile

continued 1/4 mile down across the field, entering the yard of

Steve and Lynn Durnil, where it passed between their satellite dish

and an ice shanty parked on the lawn. It crashed into their garage,

knocking loose the door, and ricoheting around inside before glancing

off a car and taking off some siding, then heading towards their

neighbor's house. It damaged some more vehicles there before being

subdued.



Gotta go work on my anti-snowmobile ditch,

Dave