Space fun

One of my granddaughter’s final science projects of her eighth grade school year was to build a rocket and to shoot it off.  All the work was done at school, so I never got a photo of the rocket or the launching.

Last summer, for Grammy Summer School, I asked her to research the U.S. space missions and to draw a timeline of them.  We still have that paperwork.

Yesterday, to continue her space education, we drove to the Deke Slayton Museum in Wisconsin.  It’s housed with the Bicycle Museum in Sparta, Wisconsin.  Sparta is one terminus of the Sparta-Elroy Bike Trail, so there are wonderful bikes displayed in the Museum as well as the Slayton memorabilia.

Donald Kent ‘Deke’ Slayton graduated from Sparta High School and after his WWII service in the USAAF, received his Bachelor of Aeronautical Engineering from the University of Minnesota.  He was selected as one of America’s first seven astronauts and was scheduled to go on the second orbital flight.

Slayton’s Mercury spacesuit is on loan to the museum from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

GN found a section of the museum that she enjoyed.

 

Because of a heart problem, Slayton never flew in the Mercury program, but after an intensive medical program, he was restored to full flight status and participated in the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project as a docking module pilot.

I doubt that GN has any aeronautical aspirations, but this was a good museum to visit . . . just in case.

Begot, begot, begotten . . . family history with Gr8

The time I’ve been having together with my mother has been an interesting look back at family history.  When Goodnight is busy doing other things . . . or sleeping later than my mother and I, Gr8 has been talking about her family.  She had a lot of siblings and they had a lot of children.

What I didn’t know a lot about was Gr8′s mother and father, and both sets of grandparents.  So we’ve been having discussions about them, their fields of employment, siblings, birthplaces, etc.

So far, I’ve only been able to get back as far as my own great-grandparents for both my mother and father, but it’s as far as the records in the United States go anyway.

Yesterday, we visited the graves of one set of  my great-grandparents.  I’ve been there before, but I wanted to prepare map and location directions for my siblings.  It made a nice Saturday drive.  We were out and about on the road for twelve hours.

I’m not sure how interested GN is in all this at this point, but in time, she will appreciate the ease with which she will be able to look into the past when she wants to.