PETERSON AIR & SPACE MUSEUM

We visited the Peterson Air & Space Museum on a warm August morning. The museum is housed in what was the original Colorado Springs Airport, built between 1928 and 1941. With the advent of WWII, this facility was turned into an Air Force Base.

The museum is named after 1st Lieutenant Eward J. Peterson, a WWII Army Air Forces pilot and native son of Colorado.

Notice the elaborate architecture around the main entrance. The modern eagle or thunderbird design is now the symbol for this museum.

After we watched a short video, our tour guide explained this mural of the WWII era, showing glimpses of life on this base here in Colorado Springs.

What was most interesting was the lower section of the mural. Major General U. G. Ent (seated in the tan uniform) is shown discussing a secret bombing mission with Paul Tibbets (standing). This was the beginning of the plan for Tibbets to fly the Enola Gay over Hiroshima. Dropping this atomic bomb on Japan would eventually bring an end to WWII. 

This Nazi flag on display in the museum was once flown at Stalag Luft VII in Moosburg, Germany, where many downed American airmen was kept after being captured. After American tanks busted down the prison gates, some POW's kept a few war trophies from this moment to bring back to the United States, among them, this Nazi flag. Look closely and you will see barbed wire around the flag from this POW camp. 

The museum also included many historic aircraft in a large outside display area. Paul is standing between an F-89J Scorpion, an Air Force interceptor from the 1950's, and an F94C Starfire, one of the first low altitude fighters flown in the late 1940's through the 1950's.

Several types of guided missiles were on display as well. This is a Boeing CIM-10A "Bomarc" ground to air interceptor missile designed to destroy enemy aircraft during the Cold War days of the early 1960's.

The HAWK (Homing All The Way Killer) missile was the first mobile medium-range surface-to-air system used by the US Army, entering service in August 1959. This HAWK system has in the markings of the 68th Air Defense Artillery, US Army Air Defense Command, which defended southern Florida from potential air attack in the 1960's.

The museum contained a replica of a ICBM launch control center that was designed for use during the Cold War to launch missiles against targets in Russia.. Here you can see seat #1 which has both launch keys locked in the red box just above the seat. Both operators had a key to a separate padlock to open the container housing the missile launch keys. The double redundancy was a preventive measure to avoid an accidental launching of the missiles. The operator in seat #1 first put his key in the operating slot.   

Across the room seat #2 is far enough away so that one person could not turn both keys simultaneously. This is an added security measure to prevent one man from launching an accidental nuclear attack.

If you look to the right of seat #2 you see where the key gets inserted and turned to the right to launch the missile.

We could enter and tour the Warning Star, an airborne early warning and control aircraft used from the 1950's through the 1970's. The massive radomes above and below the fuselage carried six tons of electronic gear.

Paul is going on board.

These EC-121 aircraft flew patrols off U.S. coasts as an aerial extension of the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line. These planes carried a crew of up to 22, including flight crew and radar operators or technicians.

These radar planes had a range of 4,000 miles and would sometimes stay airborne for more than 12 hours at a time. Multiple radar operators were utilized. Could you imagine sitting in front of this tiny radar screen for longer than a few hours at a time?

Our visit was memorable in that it allowed us to look back at the Cold War era when we were growing up. As children and young adults in the 1950-1970's, we were not as aware of the potential damage just one unintended missile could have done to the world we know today.