Space Center launches its long-awaited open house
Celebration honors 60th anniversary of NASA, achievements
It takes almost a week for Pluto to rotate around its axis. Mars circles the sun once every 23 months. But when it comes to long-awaited events, NASA has both planets beat: It’s been five years since NASA’s Johnson Space Center last opened its gates to the public.
The line of cars waiting to drive onto NASA’s campus stretched down Saturn Lane on Saturday morning as people awaited the chance to tour facilities where astronauts train and engineers work on everything that makes space travel possible, from robots to food.
The open house celebrated NASA’s 60th anniversary. A number of the agency’s accomplishments are approaching anniversaries as well.
Next year will be the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 space mission, which put the first men on the moon, and visitors on Saturday had the chance to see the control center for the mission as it undergoes historic restoration. A number of the flight control consoles were out for refurbishment, and the walls were stripped in preparation for replica wall paper to be installed; the Johnson Space Center plans to acquire and reproduce the room’s original furnishings down to the ashtrays and trash cans.
And next month will be the 20th anniversary of the International Space Station, which had its first module launched on Nov. 20, 1998. Mockups of that module and many others that are used for training were on display for people to tour.
Lori Wheaton, a NASA employee who often gives tours to visiting dignitaries, shared facts about the International Space Station — 250 miles above the earth, its truss is the length of a football field, and each of its eight solar arrays is the length of a basketball court.
Tom Bieltz, a former physics teacher at Cinco Ranch High School, responded with a fact of his own.
“I used to ask my students, ‘What could you jump out of at 17,000 miles an hour and not get hurt?’ ” he said with a grin. “The International Space Station!”
In addition to accessing to some of NASA’s greatest hits, visitors on Saturday were also able to see equipment that had never been shown before during an open house — such as commercial spacecraft.
Visitors could view a mockup of the Boeing Starliner used to train astronauts on entering and exiting the spacecraft, which can involve sliding down the side of the vehicle if you leave through the top hatch, a spokesperson explained. The Starliner is scheduled to launch next year.
It was also the first open house for NASA’s Resource Prospector, a robot designed to look for water in the permanently shaded craters of the moon. The mission was recently canceled, but that didn’t mean visitors couldn’t learn from it. A Girl Scout of San Jacinto Council robotics team, the Fluffy Unicorns, were among the people at the Open House, and the team is currently imagining solutions for living on the moon.
Heather Behringer, 8, said the three main problems in her eyes were water, power and air. Like Resource Prospector, she considered craters a possible water source. “I’m working on water filters,” she said.
The open house was filled with hopes for the future. Juan Bossett, 6, wants to be an astronaut someday, and he and his younger brother, Zach, both wore their astronaut costumes from last Halloween. It was also filled with a sense of wonder at how far technology has already come.
Lily Wren brought her 87year-old father, Que Le, to the open house because, she said, “He’s seen a lot of things in his lifetime, and this is something I wanted him to see.”
When Le was born, putting a man on the moon was the stuff of science fiction; it was decades before people began examining the prospect seriously. Now, the talk has turned to commercial spaceflight and manned missions to Mars.
“A lot has changed,” Le agreed.