| Submitted by: Evelyn C. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 15 February 2005 |
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Today was Houston Space Center (http://www.spacecenter.org) day. The first thing we discovered was that if you arrive really early (like 9:15 AM for a 10 AM opening), there is no one collecting the $3 parking fee yet. The next was that there are 'twilight tickets': if you buy a ticket within two hours of closing, it is good for the next day as well. Given that we finished San Jacinto about 3:30 PM the previous day, we could have spent an hour here and finished a little earlier today (or spent more time). Well, at least you know now. (Also, though the hours when we went were 10 AM to 5 PM, during the summer they are extended to 9 AM to 7 PM. On the other hand, I'm sure the Space Center is much more crowded then because of school vacation and everything will have long lines.)
We bought our tickets ($11.95 each minus a 10% AAA discount-if you're not a AAA member, there are $1 discount coupons just about everywhere) and got the day's schedule. There was a tram tour, two IMAX films, a film, and a live presentation, but with careful scheduling we fit everything in.
We started at 10 AM with the ninety-minute tram tour of the Johnson Space Center. This took us around the complex with stops at the Special Vehicles Operation Room, the Mission Operations Control Room (MOCR), the FCR (Flight Control Room), and the Mockup and Integration Lab. The Special Vehicles Operation Room is where they will be coordinating activities for building the new international space station, while the MOCR and FCR are new versions of the old Mission Control.
Mark and I pointed out to each other that the history of artificial satellites on the wall of the building housing the control rooms started with Edward Everett Hale's 'Brick Moon.' 'Oh, look, they mention 'Brick Moon'!' I'm sure the people behind us were saying, 'What the heck is 'Brick Moon'?'
I noticed that the control room crews are more casually dressed than they were in the Apollo days, with no white shirts or ties that I could see, and certainly more women.
During actual missions, CAPCOM is always an astronaut, and only CAPCOM and the flight surgeon talk directly to the astronauts. (Of course, during actual missions the tour doesn't stop here either.)
We also passed the Space Environment Simulation Laboratory (SESL) with its liquid nitrogen tanks, and the antenna farm.
There was a final stop at the 'Rocket Garden' for photographs, both of the rockets and of the longhorns on the other side of the fence.
Our next stop was the 11:30 AM 'mission briefing.' This started with a presentation talking about what things might be like in the future which talked about distance learning (with interaction) between Pluto Intermediate and Venus High. It's depressing to think that no one at NASA understands time lag and speed of light limitations. (When I asked the presenter about this, all she could say was that this was the future and we couldn't say what might be possible. Most scientists are willing to say that faster than light communication is not possible, except in quantum mechanical conditions.)
The next mission is STS-86, and what we saw in the MOCR was a dress rehearsal. CAPCOM will be Scott Horowitz, the only astronaut with a Ph.D. Linda Hamm will be the Flight Director. The crew will consist of Captain Jim Weatherbee, Co-Captain Mike Bloomfield, Vladimir Titov, Scott Parazynkski, Jean-Luc Cretien, Wendy Lawrence, and David Wolf, who will replace Mike Foale on Mir. Lawrence was supposed to replace him, but after the recent problems Russia requested that all astronauts on Mir be able to do EVAs in their suits. While Lawrence is fully qualified to do EVAs, she is only 5'3' (160 cm) and the Russian suits have a minimum height requirement of 5'5' (165 cm).
There was a plea for support for better funding for NASA, which currently gets only 0.81% of the Federal budget.
We then watched a fifteen-minute film of historical footage from NASA, 'On Human Destiny.' Since most people who visit the Space Center are probably familiar with this, if you are pressed for time this is probably the film to skip, although this is also the normal lead-in to the historical gallery. (I will say more about that later, because we rushed out for the IMAX film.)
Right after that was Mission to Mir, a forty-five-minute IMAX film. Made before the recent problems, it is mostly about Shannon Lucid's time on Mir. There were some impressive scenes, but much of the film was set in the Mir, which somewhat works against the IMAX format. What's the point of a fifty-foot scene to show you a ten-foot room? IMAX works best, in my opinion, on big scenes. So the space scenes were impressive, but there weren't enough of them. (The first IMAX film I saw was about putting out oil fires in Kuwait-that was impressive!)
After the film was over, we backtracked through the historical gallery from the exit near the spiral slide. (This is probably difficult to do when the Center is crowded.) This exhibit covered space flight since Robert Goddard's first liquid-fueled rocket on March 16, 1926, and included several actual spacecraft. It also included a section on how lunar samples are handled and analyzed, and had a piece of moon rock. What was different here was that you could actually touch the moon rock; this is the only place where I remember that being true.
In one of the films, someone talked about how it was nice that we were working with the Russians now, and how much further along we might be if we had been doing so all along. But we built a reusable spaceship, while the Russians built a space station. If we had been working together all along, would we still have developed both?
There were also a few 'hands-on' exhibits. An air table let you get some idea of what it would be like to work in weightlessness and maneuver an MMU (Manned Maneuvering Unit). There was a shuttle landing simulator (everyone seemed to land theirs in the swamp), and an orbital rendezvous simulator which by comparison was almost too easy. A demonstration on 'Living in Space' was pretty basic, though kids might enjoy it.
We finished with another IMAX presentation, To Be an Astronaut. This was a twenty-minute presentation on the astronaut training program. It was obviously a composite rather than following an actual astronaut, especially since at the end, the astronaut boards the Endeavor, but the Discovery takes off. (Mark claims mistakes such as launching the wrong shuttle happen sometimes in the space program.)
This finished just about 5 PM, so we had to leave. As I said, you can see everything in one day with careful scheduling.
We decided to try to make it to the Menil Collection (http://menil.org/~menil), which was open until 7 PM. By making only one possibly illegal U-turn, and running only one stop sign (by accident), we were able to recover the time lost because we got lost and because most of the corners where we wanted to turn left were marked 'No Left Turn.'
The Menil Collection is another one of those 'small but choice' selections they seem to have in the South, although it was greatly enhanced by the Surrealism exhibit temporarily displayed. This included works by Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray ('Imaginary Portrait of the Marquis de Sade'), several works by Rene Magritte ('La trahison des images', or 'The Treachery of Images'; 'Le survivant', or 'The Survivor'; 'Golconde', or 'Goldona'; 'La clef de verre', or 'The Glass Key'; 'Le soir qui tombe, or 'Evening Falls'; 'L'amiable vérité', or 'The Enduring Truth'-a three-dimensional object painted on a two-dimensional surface of a three-dimensional object painted in two dimensions!), Pablo Picasso, Yves Tanguy, and Salvador Dali ('Gangsterism and Goofy Visions of New York'). The permanent collection included Andy Warhol, Andrew Pollock, Joan Miró, Max Léger, Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, and Alexander Calder. Though small, the museum took about an hour (it would have been longer but one temporary exhibit had just closed).
Dinner was at Joe's Crab Shack, apparently a chain of seafood restaurants. I had crawfish etouffe; Mark had a fried platter.
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This was mostly a driving day. We started by heading east on I-10 to Lafayette, Louisiana, then east on US-90 E, east on LA-14 E, and south on LA-329 to Avery Island. This is the home of Tabasco sauce (http://citt.marin.cc.ca.us/ring/extras/tabasco.html) and is a privately owned island (owned by the McIlheny family). It costs fifty cents to cross the bridge to the island, which also houses Jungle Gardens, a bird refuge.
But we were there it see the Tabasco factory, though it was a bit of a disappointment. There is a film explaining the entire process, from planting through harvesting, processing, and finally bottling. (There are 400,000 bottles of Tabasco sauce produced each day.) But all you actually get to see is the final stage-the bottling-before you get a chance to buy Tabasco tchatchkas in their store. Since we had already visiting their store in the Riverwalk Mall in San Antonio, this was not as unique an experience as it might otherwise have been.
We heard something of the history of Tabasco sauce. It was first sold in 1868 for $1 per bottle. It is produced by having peppers which are a precise shade of red (matching something supposedly referred to as 'Le Petit Baton Rouge') picked, mixed with coarse Avery Island salt, mashed, and aged three years in white oak barrels. Then it is mixed with vinegar with wooden paddles for several weeks. In the bottling plant, everyone wore hair nets and even beard nets, but then again, that's in the public view.
The film talked about how some Tabasco peppers are also grown elsewhere to prevent disease from wiping out the entire species. But we read elsewhere that in fact, almost all Tabasco peppers are grown elsewhere, which may be why you don't see the growing and harvesting, or the preparation. (If, as they say, the peppers are salted the day they are picked, they must be salted elsewhere, and probably not with Avery Island salt.)
We hoped to find a good place to have lunch in New Iberia, but the old restaurants we could find were all national chains, so we ended up eating at Popeye's. Here we were in the middle of Cajun country (http://www.usnews.com/usnews/NYCU/BA94S.HTM), and this was the best we could find.
We drove to Thibodeaux, arriving too late to get to the Wetlands Acadian Cultural Center. We seem to be spending a lot of time driving on this trip, but in fact we did more driving per day in the Southwest. I guess it's that the scenery was so dramatic there that driving seemed more like sightseeing. Here we are passing some interesting scenery, but not nearly as much.
Back home there is a lot of discussion about a law requiring all children under the age of three to ride in the back seat. In Louisiana they have billboards reminding parents that it is against the law to let children under the age of six ride in the open beds of pickup trucks. |
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