{"id":212,"date":"2012-11-24T23:39:33","date_gmt":"2012-11-25T05:39:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/?p=212"},"modified":"2012-11-24T23:39:33","modified_gmt":"2012-11-25T05:39:33","slug":"space-center-houston","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/2012\/11\/24\/space-center-houston\/","title":{"rendered":"Space Center Houston"},"content":{"rendered":"

As previously noted, I spent Black Friday at Space Center Houston<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Let tell you the bad first, but please read all the way through and look at the pictures.\u00a0 First, Space Center Houston is not a part of the Johnson Space Center<\/a>.\u00a0 Basically JSC was tired of dealing with hundreds of thousands of people tromping through its corridors everyday looking at ‘exhibits’ put together by staff members in their spare time.\u00a0 So, a leadership group of JSC execs, community leaders, and others formed Manned Space Flight Education Foundation, Inc.\u00a0 MThis foundation brought in people from Disney, some film companies and local sponsors to build Space Center Houston.<\/p>\n

One the one hand, I’m glad that this is a separate, professional facility that has some real educational opportunities.\u00a0 On the other hand, it’s run like a business and, like other theme parks, some of the education seems to have gotten lost.\u00a0 (I’ll redo my post about Sea World San Antonio in a bit.)<\/p>\n

The first thing you see when you walk in is the giant, 6-story, space themed play scape for kids.\u00a0 Seriously?\u00a0 Yes, it’s a nice break for the little ones, but that’s all my kid wanted to do… like we can’t do that at Chucky Cheese every Saturday.\u00a0 This is bloody NASA.\u00a0 Let’s go touch an actual moon rock and try to land the space shuttle and see the biggest rocket ever built.\u00a0 Not spend 5 hours playing in a ball pit.\u00a0 OK, OK, I’m done.<\/p>\n

Also, this almost seems to be run like a for profit business.\u00a0 The food is cheaper at Sea World.\u00a0 The food we had was good, not stellar, but palatable.\u00a0 But is was very, very pricey.\u00a0 If you don’t count the gift shop, we spent about $120 for the day.\u00a0 Get your tickets online (they are good for a year once you get them via e-mail).\u00a0 That will save you $5 per person.\u00a0 Parking is cheaper than Sea World, but the food and the picture package (which is pretty good actually) costs.\u00a0 On the other hand, I would (and have) happily spent almost a hundred dollars feeding small fish to dolphins at Sea World.<\/p>\n

It’s not that I regret the money, I just wish there was a little more substance to the experience.\u00a0 There were some nice static displays and the movie we saw was excellent.\u00a0 You can get earphones with a canned tour.\u00a0 Each exhibit has a number that you press on the keypad and one of the former astronauts tells you about the exhibit.\u00a0 I trusted my mass geek skills and, I must say, my nerd cred remains strong.\u00a0 I only missed one question on the trivia challenge.<\/p>\n

OK, the cool stuff.\u00a0 There is a small piece of moon rock that you can touch. There is a full sized mock up of the shuttle you can go in (well, the flight deck and the mid-deck).\u00a0 And the rockets.\u00a0 You can see some really neat things.\u00a0 Here’s a few pictures (click to enlarge).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This is what greets you when you drive up.\u00a0 This is NOT a space shuttle (sigh).\u00a0 Note the giant box sticking out from behind the flight deck.\u00a0 It’s just a trainer.\u00a0 Still, it’s full sized and pretty impressive.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Mission Control (Blue Room)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This is the Blue Mission Control Room<\/a>.\u00a0 This room is mostly unused now, but it was the main control room during the construction of the ISS.\u00a0 The plaques on the left wall are all the mission patches from ISS construction flights.\u00a0 While we were there, the station crew were in their sleep cycle, so not much was going on.\u00a0 The White Mission Control Room across the hall is the one that handles the day-to-day operations of the space station.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Mercury Redstone<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This is the one that starter it all.\u00a0 The Redstone rocket<\/a> was one of the early ICBMs<\/a>.\u00a0 So, NASA lengthened it <\/a>and stuck some guy by the name of Alan Shepard<\/a> on top of it and lit the sucker off.\u00a0 Fortunately, everything worked.\u00a0 I got a really crappy picture of the actual capsule.\u00a0 The spaceship exhibit hall was basically completely dark.\u00a0 Have you ever seen a Formula 1 car cockpit?\u00a0 Now imagine that being completely closed in and covered with switches and buttons.\u00a0 Now climb in while wearing about 100 pounds of space suit and sitting on top of something like 60,000 pounds of liquid propellant and oxidizer and hope that it doesn’t explode but throws you into space instead (which may or may not be better than being exploded).<\/p>\n

Yeah, those guys had courage… and not all of them survived.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Now, guess what’s in the big building behind this little rocket (and it really is stunningly small).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Just a glimpse of the big one<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Yep, a Saturn V<\/a>.\u00a0 Not a replica or a mockup, but a real Saturn V that never flew. This is the only Saturn V on display that was built with the intention to fly.\u00a0 The stages are from different rockets.<\/p>\n

This used to be outside, but they finally restored it and moved it inside.\u00a0 It’s just so freaking enormous.\u00a0 It’s truly an awe inspiring experience.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
One of the five F-1 engines<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The people on the right give you a bit of the scale of these first stage engines<\/a>.\u00a0 They are huge.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The much smaller second stage engines.\u00a0 Still five of them.\u00a0 The five engines in the first and second stage were for redundancy.\u00a0 If anything went wrong on these two stages, then you didn’t get into space.\u00a0 With five engines, one could fail and the launch center could increase the burn time on the others to get you in the right orbit.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
The Apollo capsule<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This is the whole point of the rest of the rocket<\/a> (well this and the lunar module that sits behind it).\u00a0 But 3 guys would spend about 12 days in a space about the size of the front bench seat in a pickup truck.\u00a0 Think about this a second… all the of the pictures, the size of this rocket and that little brown part is the only part that came back down to Earth in one piece.<\/p>\n

Those rocket engines on the left are the escape system.\u00a0 In the event of a major malfunction, that rocket would fire, pulling the command module away from the exploding rest of the rocket and save the crew.<\/p>\n

The little white boxes on the service module (to the right) that look like speakers are the thrusters used to control the attitude of the ship.<\/p>\n

If you get a chance, then you need to go to Space Center Houston.\u00a0 It’s a piece of history that no one who wasn’t alive at the time can appreciate without seeing it up close.\u00a0 Reaching out and touching a piece of one of the most powerful, technologically advanced projects this planet has ever seen is amazing.<\/p>\n

NASA seems confident that they will have a manned mission to an asteroid by 2020 and a mission to Mars soon after.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As previously noted, I spent Black Friday at Space Center Houston. Let tell you the bad first, but please read…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,46,6,45],"tags":[147,144,143],"class_list":["post-212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-education","category-science","category-society","tag-mercury-redstone","tag-saturn-v","tag-space-center-houston"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}