GeekWire

Hundreds of (mostly non-working) switches, indicator lights and buttons are arrayed in the Full Fuselage Trainer's shuttle cockpit, which is part of the exhibit at Seattle's Museum of Flight.

Some people in the Seattle region might have been disappointed last year when we didn’t land a real space shuttle. But after getting a behind-the-scenes look at the space shuttle trainer being assembled at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, I walked away feeling like we got lucky.

This thing is awesome.

Over the 30-year life of NASA’s space shuttle program, every astronaut spent hours upon hours practicing in the Full Fuselage Trainer, preparing for their missions. The interior of the trainer mirrors an actual space shuttle orbiter in almost every way imaginable — from the placement of the controls to the shape of the toilet.

Stepping inside is a chance to walk in the footsteps of astronauts, and to see what they went through on their long journey into orbit.

The trainer, delivered in pieces over the past few months, is now being assembled inside the Charles Simonyi Space Gallery at the Seattle museum. Our tour was led by Geoff Nunn, the exhibit developer.

Childhood dreams were realized as there in front of me, dominating the room, stood a giant wooden space shuttle replica. The trainer is in pieces now but will be fully assembled by the end of September. The payload half is being outfitted with a new walkway where visitors will be able to walk though the trainer. The nose of the shuttle, housing the cockpit and living quarters, will be attached in its original place.

We enjoyed the rare treat of actually getting to step inside the crew cabin and flight deck. The cabin is so tiny, it’s wild to think of seven people actually living in there (eating, sleeping, using the restroom, but no shower). The trainer is precise when it comes to layout and control placement, and some of the buttons are wired to work.

Even the toilet is completely replicated, although Nunn told us that it’s non-working. Apparently, going to the bathroom in space takes such finesse that it requires its very own mockup for "training."

GeekWire

The Full Fuselage Trainer is not yet fully assembled at the Museum of Flight. The nose section, including the cockpit, is at left. The cargo bay is at right. Sometime this month, all the pieces will be put together.

Everything has its place in the cabin. It’s lined with lockers carrying everything from delicate experimental equipment to athletic exercise bands. The cabin and flight deck are covered with patches of Velcro where tools and other necessities attach. NASA used special NASA blue Velcro strips to denote regular issue items and yellow Velcro for special astronaut-requested items.

Climbing up a tiny ladder, you reach the flight deck, which is even smaller than the main cabin and covered in switches, dials, and gauges. I was momentarily tempted to act out every sci-fi film I’ve ever seen in a crazy montage. The coolest things on the flight deck are the controls for the robotic arm, the closed-circuit television screens of the payload area, and the bags that hold the ropes if one ever has to rappel down the side of the shuttle, using a system called "sky genie."

When the exhibit opens this fall, be sure to visit this amazing icon of space transportation. In the meantime, click on over to GeekWire to see our exclusive gallery of space awesomeness.

More about shuttle museum displays:

• 'Hidden' space shuttle goes public in Houston
• NASA gets set for shuttle transfers in LA and Florida
• Crew compartment trainer goes to Ohio museum
• Shuttle Discovery takes place of honor at Smithsonian

Copyright 2012 GeekWire. Reprinted with permission.

John Brecher / msnbc.com

A crowd in the Georgetown neighborhood of Seattle watches NASA's Super Guppy aircraft approach Boeing Field, carrying a key piece of a space shuttle mockup that will go on display at Seattle's Museum of Flight.

SEATTLE — It may not be a real space shuttle, but it's ours.

Today NASA delivered a key piece of the mockup that astronauts used for space shuttle practice to the Museum of Flight in Seattle, my hometown. And it arrived aboard one of the most ungainly-looking airplanes ever built. The wingless mockup is known as the Full Fuselage Trainer, or FFT. The plane has a nickname that's more colorful: the Super Guppy.

The Super Guppy looks more like a Super Whale. The wide-body turboprop airplane has a cargo hold that's been built up into a bulbous shape, specifically to carry big stuff for outer space. Only five of the Guppies were ever produced, and they were used to cart spacecraft components around for the Gemini, Apollo, Skylab and shuttle programs. This Super Guppy is the only one of its kind still flying, and this week's odyssey with the most important piece of the Full Fuselage Trainer is one of the highest-profile flights the plane has ever taken.

For decades, the plywood-built FFT sat in a building at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. The crew compartment — the part of the structure that was flown to Seattle today — was outfitted with all the buttons, switches, cockpit displays and middeck lockers that the real shuttles had. None of those gadgets worked, but they helped the astronauts get familiar with the layout before they started handling the real controls. Astronauts could also practice how they'd get out of the shuttle in the event of a landing-strip emergency.

With the end of the space shuttle era, NASA's Johnson Space Center no longer needed the FFT, so the space agency decided to donate it for display. The Seattle museum made a play for one of the flown shuttles, and even built a shuttle-sized, 15,500-square-foot Space Gallery to display it in. But Seattle lost out to Florida, California, New York and the "other Washington" in the competition for Atlantis, Endeavour, Enterprise and Discovery. The Full Fuselage Trainer served as the consolation prize.

Most of the FFT's plywood parts could be shipped up by traditional means for later assembly, but the shuttle crew compartment had to be transported all in one piece. That's why NASA's Super Guppy was called into service.

The airplane has a 25-foot-high, 25-foot-wide, 111-foot-long cargo compartment — big enough to hold the mockup's most awkward piece, even when it's bound up in shrink wrap and a protective steel frame. Over the past couple of days, the Super Guppy has been making a journey from its home at Ellington Air Force Base in Texas, over to California, and then up to Seattle at a top speed of around 200 knots. It wasn't exactly a record-setting pace — but what the Super Guppy lacks in speed, it more than makes up for in the "What the Heck Is That?" department.

The Guppy flew over my hometown and its surroundings with a Seattle-born astronaut, Greg Johnson, at the controls. Then it floated down to a landing right in front of the museum, which is adjacent to Boeing Field. One of the commentators at the museum called it a "beautifully ugly airplane."

Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire pointed to the craft with pride as the sky spit down rain. "When we get together in Washington state, we can land the big whale right behind me," she said.

Museum of Flight

NASA's Super Guppy and a chase plane fly above the mostly cloudy skies of Seattle.

Museum of Flight

After its touchdown at Seattle's Boeing Field, the turboprop-powered Super Guppy taxis over to the Museum of Flight next door.

Museum of Flight

The entire front of the Super Guppy swings open to reveal the cargo inside.

Museum of Flight

The 65,000-pound Tunner 60K aircraft cargo loader and transporter rolls toward the Super Guppy.

Museum of Flight

The cargo compartment for the Full Fuselage Trainer, wrapped in protective plastic, has been taken out of the Super Guppy for a short ride on the Tunner transporter to its new home in the Museum of Flight's Charles Simonyi Space Gallery.

Several thousand onlookers watched as the Super Guppy's entire front opened up to the side like a four-story-high door. 

"It's really cool that it's actually able to fly," Allison Kirkman, a 10-year-old student at Spirit Ridge Elementary School in Bellevue, Wash., told me as she watched from the tarmac. "It's an amazing plane, and how they built it is cool, too."

The shrink-wrapped shuttle crew compartment was moved out of the wide-yawning Super Guppy onto a 65,000-pound mobile transporter, then rolled over to the museum's Charles Simonyi Space Gallery. Over the next couple of months, the shuttle mockup will be assembled in a place of honor, alongside a Russian Soyuz capsule and a prototype lander that was used in Blue Origin's spacecraft development program. Museumgoers like Kirkman will be able to walk through the shuttle mockup's cargo bay — and they might even be able to crawl through the crew compartment, just like the astronauts did.

Kids, prepare to be amazed ... again.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Sandro Vannini / National Geographic

This "shabti," or funerary servant figure, is from the antechamber of Tutankhamun's tomb. Shabtis were inscribed with a spell from the Book of the Dead that ensured the king would do no forced labor in the afterlife. The figure is part of the "Tutankhamun: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs," an exhibit that is winding up its U.S. tour in Seattle.

Two major exhibits of ancient artifacts relating to the best-known figures from ancient Egypt, King Tut and Cleopatra, are in the last stages of their U.S. tours — and their departure could signal the end of an era.

"Cleopatra: The Exhibition" opened at the California Science Center in Los Angeles on Wednesday, while "Tutankhamun: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs" began its run at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle today. By the end of next year, the more than 250 artifacts from the two exhibitions will be back in Egypt, possibly for good.

The return to Egypt marks the end of a Tut-centric "Comeback Tour" that began back in 2005 and sparked the kind of enthusiasm that was seen back in the 1970s, during an earlier Tut exhibit. Like that 1976-1979 "Treasures of Tutankhamun" show, millions have turned out to see the glittering gold and the 3,300-year-old artifacts associated with the boy-king's short reign. More than 90,000 advance tickets already have been sold for this year's Seattle exhibit.

Transplanting Tut-mania
Among the featured objects in Seattle are a 10-foot-tall statue of the pharaoh, Tut's golden sandals and the golden funerary mask of King Psusennes I. (Tut's golden mask, which was such a hit since the '70s, was judged too fragile and valuable to travel out of Egypt this time around.)

After Seattle, the more than 100 artifacts will go to the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza, which is currently under construction and due for completion in 2015. At one time, Egyptian officials saw the revenue generated by traveling exhibits as a means to cover the museum construction costs. But last year's revolution dealt a heavy blow to the country's tourist industry, and now officials think it's more important to bring museumgoers to the treasures in Egypt than to bring the treasures to museumgoers outside Egypt.

"They're eager to see these [artifacts] return to Egypt," said Bryan Harris, vice president of sales and marketing for Arts and Exhibitions International, which helped organize the Tut tour. And they're eager for tourists to follow Tut's trail.

That came through loud and clear during a Seattle news conference on Wednesday. "Please, we need your help," Antiquities Minister Mohammed Ibrahim said. "We need you to support our revolution. We need you to support our movement toward peace and democracy."

Cleopatra's sunken treasures
The stars of the Tut exhibit are artifacts that were found 90 years ago in a long-hidden tomb by British archaeologist Howard Carter, but it's a different story for the more than 150 "Cleopatra" artifacts now on display in Los Angeles. They were brought to the surface just in the past few years during underwater excavations at the sunken sites of Alexandria, Heracleion and Canopus.

"All those artifacts were completely covered by sediment," French archaeologist Franck Goddio, leader of the underwater excavation, told me.

Slideshow: In search of Cleopatra’s palace

Christoph Gerigk / AP

Divers explore the submerged ruins of a palace and temple in Alexandria's harbor.

Launch slideshow

The project made a splash, so to speak, when the "Cleopatra" tour was first announced a couple of years ago, and since then it's been on display in Philadelphia, Cincinnati and Milwaukee. One more U.S. city, yet to be determined, could join the list after Los Angeles. But by the end of 2013, the statues, jewelry, coins and other items will be distributed among several Egyptian museums, Goddio said. Egyptian authorities are considering the construction of an underwater museum in Alexandria Harbor, and if that project goes forward, "all the artifacts will go in that museum," he said.

Goddio said the artifacts recovered so far suggest that Hellenistic Egypt, the culture in which Cleopatra lived during the first century B.C., was less Greek and much more Egyptian than experts previously thought. "The Egyptian sensitivity is much stronger than what it was thought to be at that time," he said. And that's all the more reason for present-day Egyptian officials to want those treasures back in their home country.

Fortunately, Goddio and others have been able to continue their work amid all of Egypt's political changes, including the run-up to this week's presidential elections there.

"Up to now, the authority has not changed," he told me, "and it's not expected that there will be any change from a scientific view." So even though the long-traveling treasures may be going home for good, there might be fresh archaeological finds available for future road trips.

And after all, Egypt isn't the only place that offers archaeological wonders. Just this month, for example, Penn Museum opened a "Maya 2012" exhibit featuring sculptures and replicas of monuments from the Maya civilization.

Harris acknowledges that Egypt doesn't hold a monopoly on ancient mysteries and marvels. Nevertheless, he says there's something special about old King Tut. "An exhibit like 'Tutankhamun' is really like lightning in a bottle," he told me. "For some reason, Egyptian culture, and particularly Tutankhamun, seems to captivate the imagination more than any other. ... To be honest, there's only one."

More about Egyptian treasures:

• 'King Tut' makes last stop in Seattle
• Spots on Tut's tomb suggest hasty burial
• Slideshow: King Tut's treasures in context
• Mummies and statues point to Cleopatra's tomb
• Video: Book paints Cleopatra as 'shrewd' and 'brutal'

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Ted Huetter / Museum of Flight

Blue Origin's jet-powered Charon test vehicle is brought inside Seattle's Museum of Flight.

Blue Origin, the rocket venture backed by Amazon.com billionaire founder Jeff Bezos, is sharing a 9,500-pound hunk of its little-known history — in the form of its first flying vehicle, a jet-powered lander prototype known as Charon.

The behemoth went on display this week in the Charles Simonyi Space Gallery at Seattle's Museum of Flight, which will also house a full-scale space shuttle training mockup.

Before this week, few folks outside Bezos' venture ever heard of Charon. The takeoff-and-landing platform was powered by four vertically mounted jet engines — and flew only once, on March 5, 2005, in Moses Lake, Wash. It rose to a height of 316 feet, then settled back down to a controlled landing.

Charon was moved into the museum on Tuesday and unveiled to the public on Wednesday.

"We are proud to share this piece of our company history with the Museum of Flight," Rob Meyerson, president and program manager of Blue Origin, said in a statement released by the company. "By making the original Charon vehicle available for public viewing, we hope to educate and inspire the next generation of aerospace explorers."

The technologies pioneered by Charon were applied to Blue Origin's vertical-takeoff-and-landing rocket ships — including the Goddard prototype that flew for the first time in November 2006 at Bezos' Texas spaceport, and the more capable test craft that followed. Last year, Blue Origin sent its prototype craft for suborbital space missions up to an altitude of 45,000 feet at supersonic speed — but Bezos reported that the flight had to be terminated with the loss of the vehicle, due to a flight instability that cropped up during the test. 

Blue Origin

The jet-powered Charon lander prototype rises during a test flight in 2005.

Ted Huetter / Museum of Flight

Blue Origin's Charon lander prototype is settled in its spot inside the museum.

Blue Origin is working on a new prototype for its suborbital space program, which aims to carry passengers and research payloads beyond the 100-kilometer (62-mile) boundary of outer space. At the same time, it's receiving millions of dollars from NASA to help with the development of an orbital space vehicle that could service the International Space Station.

Historically, Bezos and Blue Origin have played their cards close to the vest — but in recent months, the venture has been more open about its ambitions and its progress. That's in line with the model being set by another space-minded billionaire, Elon Musk, the founder of California-based SpaceX.

Seattle's Museum of Flight stands to benefit because Blue Origin and Amazon.com are both headquartered in the Seattle area. "Blue Origin is making incredible strides in bringing commercial space travel to fruition," Douglas King, the museum's president and CEO, said in the statement. "Charon is an exciting addition to our extensive collection of historically significant air- and spacecraft. The fact that it comes from a company in our hometown makes it even more prestigious."

King is angling to acquire artifacts from other space ventures, ranging from SpaceX to the Boeing Co. Seattle-area software billionaire Charles Simonyi has already donated a used Russian Soyuz spacecraft for display. The piece de resistance will be the shuttle mockup, known more formally as the Full Fuselage Trainer, which is currently in the midst of being transported to the museum from NASA's Johnson Space Center. The trainer is expected to be assembled in its new home by the end of the summer.

More ventures backed by space billionaires:

• Jeff Bezos aims to bring up Apollo 11's sunken engines
• Billionaires back Seattle-based asteroid mining project
• SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk elated by successful launch
• Billionaire Paul Allen plans monster plane for space launches

Correction for noon ET May 25: I originally wrote that Charon was pronounced "CARE-on," like the name of the mythical Greek ferryman of the underworld. Actually, Blue Origin's Charon was named after Pluto's largest moon. That suggests that the name should be pronounced "SHAR-on," for reasons I explain on page 56 of "The Case for Pluto." 

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Univ. of Fla. / FMNH

A 25-foot-long giant squid is splayed out on a tarp after it was picked up by a fishing crew over the weekend.

Florida fishermen snared a real-life sea monster over the weekend: a giant squid measuring 25 feet in length.

"It's really, really, really rare to get giant squids because they're so huge, and live so deep," John Slapcinsky, a collection manager at the Florida Museum of Natural History, told me. For museum workers and scientists who specialize in giant squids, this specimen is quite the catch.

Jeff Gage / Univ. of Fla. / FMNH

University of Florida researcher Roger Portell injects preservative into the giant squid.

The animal was bobbing in the water when the fisherman chanced upon it on Sunday. They hauled it onto their boat, put it on ice, and brought it to shore. There, they alerted the Florida Fish and Wildlife conservation commission, who called in the Florida Museum of Natural History.

"I thought we definitely need to bring it in, because no one’s going to believe us if we don't," Robert Benz, one of the original squid finders, said in a press release. "I didn’t want to leave it out there and just let the sharks eat it."

Somewhere along the way, the squid died. 

It's now been relocated to the Florida Museum of Natural History, where Slapcinsky and his colleagues are preserving the massive invertebrate. "Soft bodied squids spoil easily," Slapcinsky told me.

The squid will be put through quite the regimen over the next month, and will be injected with and bathed in a cocktail of preservatives. These will kill the bacteria in the body of the squid and firm up the soft tissue of the animal, Slapcinsky explained.

Univ. of Fla. / FMNH

A tentacle coils out from the dead squid's body. Studying the creature and sequencing its DNA should help scientists determine how various breeds of deep-sea squid are related.

Because they're so rarely observed in the wild, or found dead (they get eaten pretty quickly), there's a lot that scientists don't know about the behavior of the enormous animals, like how they reproduce or what they eat. Also, a debate continues about whether giant squids make up a single species, or several, and Slapcisnky hopes that DNA analysis of this new squid will have some answers. 

It's not yet clear if the squid will make it into a museum exhibit, Slapcinsky says — the museum may not have the right equipment or the space to show off the spineless specimen. But it will be available for squid researchers to visit, to take a closer look. 

More on giant squids: 

• Scientists capture giant squid on camera
• Military studies squid camouflage
• Hawaiian squid carries a built in light 

Nidhi Subbaraman writes about technology and science at msnbc.com. Find her on Twitter and join our conversation on the Cosmic Log Facebook page.