Follow in astronauts’ footsteps
Space Center Houston offers a look back at the space program and inspires dreams of the future.
HOUSTON — Houston, we have a problem.
Most people know the Bayou City is home to the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, but fewer realize those familiar words, repeated most notably in the movie “Apollo 13,” were misquoted. (Apollo 13 astronaut Jack Swigert Jr. actually said, “Houston, we’ve had a problem here.”)
Such tidbits abound in displays that take a fascinating look at the past, present and future of America’s exploration of the skies at Space Center Houston, a Smithsonian Affiliate museum that is one of the city’s top attractions.
Space Center Houston is the official visitor center of the Johnson center, but it is a nonprofit, owned and operated by the Manned Space Flight Education Foundation and not a part of NASA.
A general admission ticket will allow you to see the world’s largest collection of moon rocks and lunar samples, as well as more than 400 space artifacts in the center’s permanent and traveling exhibits.
If you’re a space buff like me, you’ll want to take the museum’s Level 9 Tour, an in-depth experience that lasts about five hours. It costs $89.95, plus a $1.50 service charge if you buy your ticket online. But I thought this look at NASA facilities where history was made — and where future missions are being shaped — was well worth the price.
I started the tour one April morning with a look at the Saturn V rocket, which was used to transport and land astronauts on the moon during the Apollo missions in the ’60s and ’70s. As I stood at its base, I could imagine the fire roaring out of the tail of the 36-story rocket as it blasted off.
The exhibit reminds us that astronauts Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died on the launchpad during a 1967 test of Apollo 1 well before the first humans — astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin — landed on the moon on July 20, 1969.
Today, the missions are different, but the goal to explore the unknown remains. Eager to see the astronauts’ workplace, my tour group boarded a van for a drive through part of the 1,620-acre campus. Tour guide Neal Wiley explained that the NASA complex has a 99-year lease with Rice University.
“In the ’60s, no one was sure that NASA would last, so the university trustees thought if it didn’t work, they would have a ready-made campus called Rice University at Clear Lake,” Wiley said. Fortunately, the campus survives as the Johnson Space Center.
After lunch at a campus cafeteria, the group headed to Building 9, the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility, where NASA astronauts train for duty on the International Space Station, or ISS. The place looked like a huge airplane hangar, with people dwarfed by the mock-ups housed there.
We walked past replicas of different ISS sections and stopped for a preview of what could be the next big step for mankind. NASA aims to send humans into deep space, landing on an asteroid by 2025 and on the planet Mars in the 2030s.
To get there, engineers are designing the Orion, a capsule that will hold a crew of four, and with the addition of a habitat module, could expand to six. At first glance, the Orion looked a lot like the Apollo capsules of yesteryear. As I peered into the small chamber, I couldn’t help but hope that we’re taking a step back to the future.
The next stop on the tour was Building 30, the Christopher C. Kraft Jr. Mission Control Center, a mostly windowless structure named for NASA’s first flight director.
We gathered first in the observation deck above the flight control room for the ISS, where a ground team monitors the station and astronauts as they circle the Earth every 90 minutes. Dominating the room are five giant screens with views of space and an orbital tracking map that shows the location of the station at all times.
Next up: the historic Apollo Flight Control Room, used from 1965 to 1992. Here, we were allowed to walk the floor and sit at the actual consoles where state-of-the-art technology meant small TV screens connected by miles of wires to a ground-floor mainframe computer.
Although it was neat to sit where history was made, I was dismayed to see that the consoles were not protected by Plexiglas, allowing curious visitors to flick the switches and play with the historic setup as though they were faux exhibits.
The last stop was a quick peek at the Sonny Carter Training Facility-Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, where astronauts train for space walks in a 40-foot-deep pool to simulate zero gravity.
All too soon, the tour was over. The walk down space flight’s memory lane was a reminder of what people are capable of accomplishing when we work together. With luck, in the not-too-distant future some intrepid astronaut is going to call home and say, “Houston, Orion has landed on Mars.”