Ed Smylie, Who Saved the Apollo 13 Crew with Duct Tape, Dies at 95

If you ever have the opportunity, visit the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, Kansas. They have the actual Apollo 13 Command Module on display.

That place looks great - they appear to also have an SR-71. I wish I'd known about it last time I did the long drive through KS...

FWIW I find it to be a much better museum than the more-famous one in Huntsville, AL. That one's badly run-down and is about 50% some kind of gross defense contractor permanent trade-show installation—though the blown-apart Saturn V they've got suspended in a hangar is notably amazing to see.

The Cosmosphere's got a more impressive collection (though that Saturn V makes up a lot of ground for Huntsville) and the presentation is much better.

There's an OK zoo (great, adjusting for where it is, really) nearby, worth a stop if you're there with kids anyway, but not much else I know of in the area. It's weird that there's such a good museum so far from everything, including from the most-traveled highway through-routes for the state.

They built the lobby around the SR-71. It's friggin' cool.

The National Museum of the USAF in Dayton, OH is also a must-visit, the primary focus is WWI-WII aircraft but they have many Space Race era artifacts as well.

Neil Armstrong’s Museum in Wapakoneta, OH isn’t that much further away, but much smaller.

Sad to hear about how much the Space & Rocket center has been let to deteriorate. That place really sparked my interest in science & engineering as a child. Even went to Space Camp there way back in the day.

Yeah, I remember going as a kid (the Saturn V and "rocket garden" are what stuck with me and how I realized I'd been there before) and thinking it was great, but going again a couple years ago it was a huge let-down. So much of it was just ugly MIC sales powerpoint infographics with not-great accompanying displays of missiles and such, there was a whole area that seemed to just be a warfare drone military contractor showroom (which could be cool, but the presentation was about as boring as possible in this case), a bunch of the interactive bits were broken, most of the handful still working cost extra (and admission was not what I'd call cheap), and in general it just felt like a place struggling to survive. It gave an almost ex-Warsaw-Pact vibe of being well past its prime and decaying in place. The Saturn V is still amazing, though, but even there the little bit of the hangar floor and wall space that they actually bothered to use was given over to kinda-lame material about things like the SLS that also had a strong "this came straight from a contractor's marketing department" feeling.

I'd also been to the Cosmosphere as a kid (the SR-71 in the lobby is how I recognized that one when I returned, haha, don't see that every day) and have been about three more times over the last 15 years, as an adult, and it's still great.

And if you ever find yourself in Alamagordo, New Mexico, the NM Air and Space Museum is nice: https://nmspacemuseum.org/#

They have, IIRC, one of the Gemini capsules, but also some really cool demonstrations. It is worth it to time that and one of the Trinity test site tours if you're interested in nuclear history as well, then take a trip north to Albuquerque for the Nat'l Nuclear History Museum and (for the kids and kidlike adults) Explora is a neat little hands on museum.

> It's weird that there's such a good museum so far from everything, including from the most-traveled highway through-routes for the state.

It was built near the most-traveled highway through-route in Kansas, considering it was originally established in 1962.

It's only a couple of miles from US-50. Much of US-50 aligns with the first transcontinental highway, the Lincoln Highway; and for much of the 20th century US-50 was one of the primary east-west highways. It looks like it currently skirts around Hutchinson, but I'd bet 50 years ago it passed directly through the middle of town, very close if not adjacent to the Cosmosphere.[1]

The construction of I-70 in Kansas started in the mid 1950s, but didn't completely cross Kansas until 1970. And it would have taken decades for development patterns to shift from the US-50 corridor to the I-70 corridor.

[1] At least as of 1939 it appears to pass directly through the downtown: https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~2... (EDIT: 1962 map shows the same: https://www.ksdot.gov/home/showpublisheddocument/4727/638724...)