Stafford Air and Space

Stafford Air & Space
Weatherford, OK: December 27, 2004

Willy Logan: Home

Amateur Film

My father and I visited the Thomas P. Stafford Air and Space Museum during the Christmas break of my freshman year of college. The museum is in Weatherford, OK, about an hour east of Oklahoma City on Route 66 (now Interstate 40). As we concluded after spending a good many hours at the museum, the place is a high-quality establishment, considering especially its isolation in western Oklahoma. The first part of the museum focuses on General Stafford's life, from his childhood in Weatherford to his career as an aviator and subsequently an astronaut. It's rare that I go to an air museum and learn a great deal, but I did there.

The main part of the museum is more extensive and not focused on Stafford exclusively. I was surprised to see a good collection of artifacts (cameras, rocket engines, mementos), models, and mockups, but not too much that the collection was cluttered or impossible to maintain. Some of the artifacts were notably lacking in explanatory text, but never mind, since one of the museum volunteers repeatedly came back to answer our questions. We left the museum, eventually, quite satisfied.

image: Stafford's in-flight suit for the Apollo 10 mission.
image: A large model of the Hindenburg.
image: A half-scale model of the Lunar Module, which I thought looked a tad goofy.
image: Replicas of the Spirt of St. Louis are all over the place.
image: Mission control consoles as museum artifacts are also fairly prolific.
image: The docking adaptor for the Apollo/Soyuz Test Project, on which Stafford flew. I'm assuming this is an engineering mockup.
image: A docking probe from an Apollo spacecraft.
image: A high-gain antenna from an Apollo spacecraft.
image: A Martin-Baker ejection seat.
image: The Cyrillic lettering under the cockpit of this Mig-21, transliterated into Roman characters, read "PILOT, GENERAL-MAJOR T. P. STAFFORD".