Fleet Science Center

This guide to the Fleet Science Center in San Diego opens with the building's very first employee, hired as an usher three days before a theater that had never officially existed opened its doors on March 10, 1973. You'll hear about the tilted planetarium dome behind that opening night, a design that physicist Edward Creutz and engineer James Crooks Junior pushed the field into for the first time, angling the audience out toward the stars instead of straight up. Stand under that same dome, tilted the way it was for the crowd that first week, and think about how it felt to learn a brand-new machine in real time alongside them.