When I was a kid being an Astronaut was a big deal. Rocket launches were a big deal. It was easy to believe that all those Science Fiction stories about living on the moon and exploring the universe were going to become reality. And not in some distant future, in the here and now.
NASA in the here and how is kind of a joke. I love Space Center Houston, but at the same time, I hate that they rent themselves out for Corporate Events and Birthday Parties like they are a branch of Disney. I know that Space Center Houston is a theme park,but they don’t give tours of the Pentagon where you get to pretend to be a Spy, or do they?
Space Center Houston seems a little down on it’s heels. The two IMAX movies they showed were both over five years old. One of them was close to ten years old. Then there is the general obsolescence of the whole place-most of the Tram Tour dealt with the giant Space Shuttle Simulators-and the Space Shuttle is being phased out after two more missions. Of course, one of the more fascinating displays is the unused Saturn 5 rocket laying in a large shed. The fact that NASA is now taking a giant leap backwards and returning to rocket flights has to be a blow to everyone who is a fan of manned space flight. Assuming NASA even gets to go back to using rockets.
One of the odder items discussed in the old IMAX films was a Robonaunt-a machine that looked a lot like Boba Fett in the film, but now looks more like the robot cop from the most recent Star Trek. In the old NASA film they talked about how the Robonaunt would be going to space in 2005-but part of the news for the next flight is the fact that Robonaunt is just now heading to the Space Station.
Another funny bit of info was that the life expectancy of the International Space Station was ten years. Really? We’ve spent twenty years making something that is designed to be space junk in ten years? What this means is that once the ISS is finished in 2011 it is expected to remain in operation until 2015. WTF? Of course, it seems that the Hubble Space Telescope was only supposed to work for five years and it is still ticking along 20 years later.
The tour guide on our almost two hour long Tram Tour was a sour little woman that looked as if she would have liked to be anywhere other than giving this stupid tram tour. She stood around with a pissed off look on her face and gave her little speeches with a minimum of effort and followed the script exactly as written. On the way back we happened to hop onto a different Tram, where the tour guide told jokes and seemed perfectly happy to be working at NASA. It was too bad we didn’t have him from the start and only got to hear him talking for a few minutes.
As a portrait photographer I found the stills for sale in the Space Center Houston gift shop a little annoying. Here were 8×10 publicity stills from all of the Manned Flight Programs, some of then were nothing to write home about, but some of them were very good portraits. I picked up one of Jim Lovell, the man who will forever be known as the astronaut Tom Hanks played in Apollo 13. It was a good portrait, so I flipped it over to check the photo credit, to see who had taken it. Photo Credit:NASA. So some anonymous nobody who snapped shutters at NASA took this photo of Jim Lovell and they couldn’t even be bothered to give him a name credit for taking it. Since NASA is a government body, does the image even have a copyright?
There is a lot to see at Houston Space Center and it took us two trips to see most of it. Among the way cool neato stuff on display are a lot of old rockets, old space suits, and mock ups of one sort or another that lets you see how the various items were used. Among my favorite bits of business was a giant engine sitting outside the hanger where the last Saturn Five rocket is housed. This huge engine has a little plaque saying it is a Rocket Engine designed by Rocketdyne. Rocketdyne? Hmm, the fight for the future began a long time ago.
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