posted 11-10-2014 08:30 AM               

What I'm interested in is finding out exactly what items were displayed along with the command module and its hatch. I know there was a Norman Rockwell painting, I'm not sure which one, and the tour report lists a "navigation map" and a "computer readout sheet" along with several other items I can readily identify.

posted 11-10-2014 10:45 AM               

We covered the 50 State Tour in our book "Marketing the Moon" and have a full chapter on it. We include the layout diagram of the entire truck, including display diagram in the book. But I also have LOADS of additional info (original press kit, original NASA report on the results of the tour, etc. etc.). We should talk — there is a lot that didn't make it in the book, despite it covering a whole chapter.

But listed on the layout schematic (which we have in the book) are:

• Rockwell painting of the LM on surface
  
• Three life size color photos of astronauts
  
• Six flown artifacts from the flight — Aldrin's glove, navigation map, clock timer, computer readout sheet, space food, sunglasses, and pen
  
• Call outs describing vital parts of capsule
  
• Color photos of mission
  
• Saturn V cut-away
  
• The capsule itself
  
• And an Apollo 11 moon rock

On the specific Rockwell painting, I believe it was "Man's First Step on the Moon" — but will confirm with my notes when I get home.

posted 02-09-2015 03:50 PM               

This what you offer in your post here comments on the discovery I made in reading in your book about the National Tour. I did myself attend the capsule display in Albany, NY. I wondered for years just what the memories were that I had about what I saw once. Your book with the chapter on the tour gave me the answers to my wondering all these years. I see now that it was the Apollo 11 capsule that I saw in Albany one autumn Sunday afternoon when I was in high school.

In your book I strained to read the tiny text on the illustration listing the tour cities and dates. I could make out that the capsule was in Albany in early October, 1970. Your chapter telling this whole story helps me recover my personal memory of seeing it.

The trailer was set up on the big park lawn west of the grand New York State Capitol Building. This was a family event for us and we stood in line with hundreds of other people waiting our turn to walk through the display. I remember how you could reach in and touch the capsule. I recall how my brother and I even could reach in and somehow touch the torched surface of the capsule bottom. Some of the charred material even came away under our fingernails. Oops!

Thanks again to you and David for your absorbing book! When I saw this post you offered, I jumped at the chance here to register and offer a comment and a compliment to you. It was just this past weekend that I finally got to browse your book. But I read the whole section on the National Tour. I was so fascinated by what you told, that I did a search here just now and found this site. When I saw your name I just had to write this note.

Reading your book this weekend was part of seeming alignment of special things. The space station was visible over Indianapolis on Friday night. I missed seeing it, but I have watched it at other times. But I also missed seeing Air Force One when it flew over our campus here in Indianapolis on Friday bringing the President in for a Town Hall meeting with our students. He is stumping for his bold venture to fund community college tuition for qualified students — those with the 'right stuff' we presume!

So I guess things are still 'looking up' in our world even as men going to the Moon is an ever more distant memory. I'm glad to be old enough to remember the excitement of that decade of grand space exploration. May your marvelous new book now give us all something 'brand' new to see under the Moon.

(I wonder if Norman Rockwell made a visit to see the National Tour in Albany. He lived just over the state line in MA and the drive would have been shorter by far for him than up to Montpelier.)

posted 02-10-2015 08:48 AM               

I will have to get this book to help my memories.

posted 02-22-2017 02:26 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by Ronpur:
My family went to the Illinois State Fair in Springfield in what I assume was August 1971 to see Columbia.

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According to the last two paragraphs of this article the tour wasn't just to the 50 states, but Columbia toured the 50 U.S. capitals. That's why you saw it in Springfield.

posted 02-25-2017 02:00 PM               

Before it was entrusted to the Smithsonian for preservation and public display, Columbia went on another, now largely forgotten, journey. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) organized and executed an ambitious public tour of a Moon rock, Neil Armstrong's lunar extravehicular activity (EVA) spacesuit, several small items that had returned from the mission, and the Command Module Columbia. Stopping at 49 state capitals, the District of Columbia, and Anchorage Alaska, the tour provided Americans with a unique opportunity to view and marvel at these historic items. When the tour was over, in 1971, Columbia was relocated to Washington, DC. It has been cared for and displayed by the Smithsonian Institution ever since, until now.

As you prepare to see Columbia in one of the four stops of the tour, relive its first journey across the US here with pages from NASA's 1971 report for the "Fifty-State National Tour" along with images from that period.