Over-the-moon experience
Camping out at Space Center Houston fulfills childhood dream
From the time I could read the most basic Dr. Seuss rhymes, I wanted to live in my local library. It wasn’t a great library. In truth, it was small and clearly had weathered several years of budget cuts. But I could think of nothing better than having millions of pages of adventure, mystery and suspense all to myself after the lights went out and the doors locked for the night.
I never managed to make that happen (despite my many attempts to get locked inside at closing time), but when I woke up last weekend under a fuel cell from the Apollo-era, I realized that I had achieved the adult version of my dream.
I got locked in at Space Center Houston, the museum side of NASA’s Johnson Space Center. And I didn’t even have to hide in a spaceship to do it.
The center has a program specifically designed to allow families access to the museum after the lights go out. It costs about $60 per person, and includes activities such as stargazing, robotics racing and rocket launching. But frankly, it’s 10 times more fun to explore the museum without the crush of hundreds of people crowding the exhibits. And waking up on the floor of the museum to ’60s jams didn’t hurt either. Just like me, the kids participating in the program weren’t around during the height of human space explora when tion, the nation was captivated as we raced Russia to the moon (a competition we won in 1969). Some of them only know a world in which NASA relies on the Russians to
send our astronauts to the International Space Station, a practice that started after the Space Shuttle program was shuttered in 2011.
They’ve lived in a world where astronauts aren’t exploring new territories — instead returning to the same laboratory in the stars time and time again — and the same men and women, largely, are unknown players unlike the fliers of an earlier time.
But that didn’t seem to impede the children’s excitement about spending the night among space-related artifacts or hinder their knowledge of NASA-related facts.
The children’s elation appears to highlight a change in how the U.S. sees the space program: Interest has increased as commercial companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin make real strides in the space industry, and NASA aims to return to the moon in the next couple of years.
They were just as thrilled as I was to know they didn’t need to leave when a voice over the loud speaker counted down to closing time: 30 minutes to closing — 15, 10, and finally five. The lights dimmed on the museum’s exhibits, the gates came down with a clatter in front of the two gift shops and the bulk of employees gathered their belongings and hurried out the front doors, now locked from the outside.
After visitors cleared out for the day and the dust settled, one mother — clearly a NASA fan — pointed out a spot to her young daughter toward the back of the museum.
“You see that,” she said. “Mommy had her picture taken there when she was a little girl. I want to take your picture in that same spot tonight.”
It reminded me so much of interactions I had with my mom when I was young: As we’d wander the library together, she’d pull books off the shelves and hand them to me. “These were some my favorite books when I was a kid,” she’d say. “I want you to read them.”
Sure, the museum isn’t the same as a library, with its stacks upon stacks of books just waiting to be opened. But there are more than 400 artifacts scattered throughout the 250,000-square-foot facility. And on Saturday, I had them (almost) all to myself.
Looking for adventure? Head over to Starship Gallery to see the Apollo 17 capsule, which took astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt on NASA’s last trip to the moon in 1972, and the module used to train astronauts headed to SkyLab, the agency’s first space station, that flew from 1973 to 1974.
Looking for mystery? Visit the Mission to Mars exhibit, where you can touch a Martian rock and learn about the agency’s major challenges to getting there.
Looking for suspense? Go look at the array of space suits the center has on display and wonder how in the world some of the older models kept people alive.
These exhibits and artifacts are awe-inspiring when the museum is teeming with people of all ages and nationalities. But being able to study each of these artifacts in a quiet, unrushed atmosphere was wonderful.
I learned so much more this way.
And even though I go to Space Center Houston about every other month, I discovered something I’d never seen before: An enormous mural of an astronaut is painted toward the back of the museum, near where you jump on a tram to the JSC grounds. The mural was painted by Alan Bean, my favorite Apollo astronaut.
Bean was the fourth man on the moon, an accomplished painter and a wonderfully kind man. He also died recently, which broke my heart and made discovering his mural that much more moving.
I get to do a lot of amazing things as the Chronicle’s only NASA reporter. I’ve interviewed astronauts, stood on the Mission Control room floor and climbed into claustrophobia-inducing spaceship mockups. But the beauty of my museum adventure last weekend is that anyone can do it.
I still want to live in a library. But for now, my space center adventure will do.