We’ll send postcards—pinball museums, CERN, and more favorite Ars trips of all time

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  • The Art of Video Games at the Smithsonian (2012). Not every tour or museum exhibit has to be this on-brand for Ars to visit, but of course we were going to this one.
  • Maybe Ars hasn’t been attending E3 (2008) quite as long as CES (2006), but we knew early on to visit the event’s annual “Into The Pixel” art exhibit. It showcases art inspired by video games, like this painting, which might be better than Sonic RPG itself.
  • Ars famously took a trip to the Creation Museum in 2014 for the debates between Bill Nye and museum CEO Ken Ham… but it wasn’t our first trip. That honor belongs to former Kentucky resident / current Cars Technica Editor Jonathan Gitlin in 2008. Yes, a lot of it is eyeroll-y, but what kid wouldn’t want to mount a triceratops?
  • From our trip in 2014, here’s one of the many detailed models in the Dinosaur Den (where we learn biblical history is the key to understanding dinos).
    Eric Bangeman
  • Proving Jonathan Gitlin right years later, here’s Deputy Editor Nate Anderson wishing he was young enough to ride the dinosaur in 2014.
    Eric Bangeman
  • One of our earlier behind-the-scenes industry tours (2010) involves this Werewolf Elvis at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects, where students learn tools of the trade to enter VFX in film, movies, and video games.
  • Speaking of great behind-the-scenes tours, in 2010, Ars spent an afternoon at Blizzard headquarters. These are the original oil paintings that were later used as an element in the first World of Warcraft boxes.
  • Blizzard also had an actual on-campus museum guarded by this bearded fellow.
  • Ars Science seems to have a thing for hadron colliders. Science Editor John Timmer visited the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Labs in 2010. This is STAR, a detector that specializes in tracking the thousands of particles produced by each ion collision at RHIC. (Human for scale.)
  • When Timmer visited the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland (2010), the LHC was active—which meant no way any humans were going below ground. But here are some spare quadrupole magnets in case they’re needed to replace failed hardware in the LHC. (Don’t worry, he got to see everything in all its glory in 2015.
  • And in 2012, we checked the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) off the list. Here’s where the magic happens: the particle accelerator beam eventually makes it to this hall, where all the undulators reside—it’s appropriately named the Undulator Hall. Each section contains 100 magnetic poles, three centimeters each, that wiggle the beam in order to produce the X-ray beam.
  • OK, one more—here’s the control room of a particle accelerator, this time from the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab of Chicago (2011).
  • The tour Ars was always destined to take: looking down “the Trench”—the front row of the restored Apollo Mission Operations Control Room.
  • MOCR 2 overview from the top left. Just visible at right is the red “Batphone” on the Department of Defense controller console.
  • No one has the willpower to avoid this button. We pressed it about a dozen times.
    Steve Michael
  • Not all our aviation and space travel is for US organizations. At the Science Museum in London, for instance, we saw this great exhibit on Cosmonauts. It included gems like this ejector seat used for dogs in orbit. #LaikaForever
  • Ars gets behind the scenes of New Space, too. Here, Jeff Bezos stands next to the copper lining for a BE-4 engine nozzle in his Blue Origin rocket factory (2016).
  • Ars, never one to say “no” to Lego, couldn’t resist the Art of the Brick when it came near Seattle (2016). This Mona Lisa version is easily twice the size of the real painting.
  • Otherwise, much tinier Legos would have been necessary.
  • Meet George, a 1958 one-of-a-kind analog computer. It arrived at the Vintage Computing Festival East just in time for our first (2015).
  • More incredible beauty in the enchanted forest. I’m not sure what you’d call the enchanted DIY interactive wonderland that is Meow Wolf, but we’re sure glad we took the tour (2016).
  • Probably the best tour Ars ever took—IT Editor and ex-Navy man Sean Gallagher revisiting his old ship. Here’s turret one and two of the USS Iowa, triple 16-inch 50 caliber main guns. A third turret sits aft of the superstructure. The turrets individually weigh more than a World War II destroyer.
  • Gallagher also helped us tour the National World War II Museum‘s decade-long effort to get a PT boat back to water—here he is chatting in the sleeping quarters. During the war, PT-305 was home to two officers, 11 men. Eight people would bunk in this room.
  • Speaking of military, at the Imperial War Museum in England, this English Electric Lightning was a hotrod for the skies. It could climb at a rate of 20,000 feet/min (101m/s) to well above 60,000 feet (18,288m). In fact, the Lightning was even able to intercept U-2s, and one pilot took his to 88,000 feet (26,822m). But its tiny fuel tanks meant it couldn’t loiter, and if you were taller than about 5’9″ (1.75m) you couldn’t fly it, unless you wanted your lower legs to be torn off in the event of having to eject.
  • While staffer Nathan Mattise lived in New Orleans, we couldn’t help but arrange a behind-the-scenes look at the Michoud Assembly Facility—where NASA’s rockets have their start. Here’s the humble beginnings of Orion, for instance.
  • Ars has also enjoyed New Space trips. While visiting Firefly Aerospace (aiming for a small sat launch in fall 2019), we saw this mysterious garage—it’s full of vintage rocket equipment! “These young engineers can come in, grab an old missile or something like that, tear it apart, and get a really good hands-on feel for what was done in the past in order to build for the future,” Firefly Aerospace CEO Tom Markusic told us. “Most people don’t get to see this.”
  • Seattle’s MoPop (Museum of Pop Culture, formerly the EMP) is one of our favorite regular visits for exhibitions like this, on the origins of Marvel Comics. The exhibit’s most selfie-friendly portion is this couch, complete with a napping Thing.
  • Numerous walls are set up with countless phones.
  • Here’s one final niche favorite: At the Museum of Pinball in Southern California, you rarely had to wait long for any particular game, but attendance was solid. (They had 700 machines when we visited in 2015; they’ve added roughly 400 since.)

By default, life at Ars involves a lot of day-to-day work from a home office. But putting together two-decades-and-counting of high-quality journalism has opened opportunities over the years that may not have existed in 1999. Looking back through the archives recently in light of our 20th anniversary, we couldn’t help but notice all the unbelievable places we’ve been and seen previously. Maybe things started with looking at Mac OS X DP2 from the confines of the Siracusa house, but work here has pretty quickly evolved to require occasional dinosaur riding and NASA booties wearing, too.

Ars will never say no to an on-the-nose museum exhibit (thank you again, Smithsonian’s Art of the Video Game), but some of our most memorable tours have leveraged journalism privilege into some amazing behind-the-scenes experiences to share with readers. We’ve seen particle accelerators across continents and followed the forum’s lead into hallowed ground like Mission Control (editor’s note: we really need to do the same with the National Air Force Museum, too). Our former Navy man got to visit his old ship and see the quarters on a newly restored WWII PT-boat. Ars has seen old space and new space up close, and we even spent quality time with George, the early supercomputer.

Luckily, the future looks like it will have more of the same—if recent trips to the set of The Orville or to the Boring Company’s LA tunnel are any indication, at least. We’ll try to be better about postcards (and certainly remain open to invitations), but for now it’s time to reminiscence and look back at snapshots from some of Ars’ greatest trips.

Listing image by Jonathan Gitlin

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1440613