| Submitted by: Mark R. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 15 February 2005 |
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Who would have built a machine that complex in Arthurian times? Look how much more complex it is than what Leonardo Da Vinci only put on paper. And what is a speedboat scene doing in an Arthurian film? Bad stuff.
We go to the grocery to stock up on the snack stuff we are running low on. Back at the room I work and in the background see Escape from L.A. Horrid film. 'Free cable movies' is not always such a great thing in a motel.
This is where I am now. I have put a classical station on the radio. I was intending to read when I got done but I have fallen asleep a couple of times. My writing must be dull. If it puts me to sleep and I actually can picture what I am describing, what must it do to you?
I guess I am not exactly sure why you are reading. I rarely read trip logs. The adage is to write what you like to read. I do basically three kinds of writing. I write trip logs, I write film reviews, and I write a weekly editorial. Well, I almost never read trip logs. I do some reading about film. The editorials are most like I read. I read scattershot. Right now I might be interested in reading about the Civil War. When I get home I may read Richard Feynman's Six Easy Pieces. After that it may be a science fiction book. The editorials are scattershot like the writing. Of course, the trip logs may be like the editorials. I certainly editorialize in the trip logs. And I go off in bizarre directions.
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09/03/97--Houston, Texas: Houston Space Center:
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Really uncomfortable night. First of all, we both have coughs. Evelyn had a cold early in the trip and gave it to me. Then I think she picked up another one. Pete Rubinstein noted that at the convention the amount of coughing he heard during panels increased daily. There must be some sort of airborne virus and I had heard that we hit a period when there was some sort of a cold going around. But what hit us is the air conditioner in the room is right over the bed so if it is on at all, it is too cold. If it is off, it is too hot. And it is impossible to shut out the light coming into the room. That combined with the colds gave us really uncomfortable nights.
On the other hand, this is a pretty interesting motel. I figure Grant got out of the military in the 1950s and built this place. It has been perfectly maintained since then and only minimally updated. The sign still advertises 'pool' and 'color TV' and claims 'hotel service' showing a bellboy with the little cylindrical hat. A jagged sidewalk runs around the building so the guest parks at an angle in front of their room and the awning forms a sort of carport for each. The motel surrounds a pool (well, an adult and a children's pool, both kidney-shaped). Three parallel beams of water parabola into the pool for decoration. Around the pool are tables under Polynesian-style palm frond umbrellas. All of this is perfectly maintained. No ants, no toilets that don't flush. It is like the place was just built. As we travel, toilets in motel rooms are the biggest problem. It seems that more than a third do not work properly. This percentage is up from previous trips. I guess the toilet is the most complex piece of technology maintained by the motel. At least it is the most complex one we see. But a large percentage are broken outright or have to be coaxed to flush.
We have been gone a long time. It is hard to believe that we are still, at least at this instant, in the first half of the trip. Today we hit the halfway point.
As we approach the Houston Space Center we pass the NASA Hair Center and the NASA Eye Center. McDonalds has a plaster astronaut on top of their building holding a container of fries. Visible proof that the space program helps the rest of the economy. We pull into the parking lot and there is nearly nobody here. Then it doesn't open for half an hour.
The first display you see as you approach the building is a Saturn car. Saturn is one of the sponsors of the space center so I guess the space center has its Saturn boosters. The door has a sign saying state law prohibits carrying a handgun onto these premises. Of course, you never know when you are going to need some protection in a science museum.
No sooner did the museum open than the first tram tour started. We rushed to the back of the museum. We met some other SF fans who had been to the convention in San Antonio.
On the Tram tour we saw the Special Vehicle Operations Room and Mission Control. The latter has been the Mission Control Room used since 1995. Today they were doing a training mission in conjunction with astronauts in Building 9. The center of operations was the Flight Director's station and just to the right was Capcom. The latter is capsule communication, the person who talks directly to the astronauts. Capcom is almost always an astronaut. On the wall between the two control rooms there was a timeline showing developments in space flight. It started in the 1850s or so with the story 'Brick Moon' by Edward Everett Hale. Even some of the staunchest SF fans have not heard of this novel or certainly have not read it. I had heard of it and was surprised to see it available on the Web. I had our science fiction club at (then) AT&T read it. I was interested to see an illustration for it.
We next went to Building 9, the Mockup and Integration Lab. They have a full-sized shuttle, complete but for wings. They have helium balloon a section of a torus-the shape of a slice of doughnut or a piece of macaroni-that is used for manipulation practice. We didn't see it but there is a place with an air-bearing floor. That is a nearly frictionless floor like the board in air hockey. They have a simulation of the shuttle arm. The guide had asked for question and nobody was asking them so I thought I could remedy the situation. What they use is a lot more powerful than the real mechanical arm since the test one would have to also overcome gravity. Clearly having a mechanical arm in gravity, it would handle differently than one in no gravity. So I asked how similar is the handling to the handling in space. 'Very similar.' Okay, ask a stupid question...
The presentation is sprinkled liberally with comments like 'The space station is vital next step in our moving into space.' There were just two messages they wanted to get to people. One, kids should get lots of math and science and then go into space careers. Two, the space program is a really good deal for the taxpayer and our destiny is in space. In my case they are preaching to the converted. I think they understate the importance of space exploration. I would judge that the human race is either going to become a space-faring species or it will not see the fourth millennium. There are too many threats to Planet Earth. Over the very long term we must learn to survive without the planet, as unthinkable as that seems to us today. To tie the existence of the human race to a planet in which there are more and more threats to all life is species suicide. It may not be a nuclear holocaust, it may not be pollution destroying the food chain, it may not be a virus dredged up in a rain forest that we have no defenses against, it may not be a comet hit.
It may be something about which we have no conception currently. But as long as we think of our great-grandparents as having lived a long, long time ago and our great-grandchildren as living off in some incomprehensible future, we can still be optimistic. If we start looking at thirty-generation intervals of humanity you see we have just hit the time when people can get their hands on new power and use it selfishly or stupidly or just ignorantly. And there have always been natural threats. There is a lot lower probability that Earth will survive the third millennium than that it would survive the second. If that is true or options are to sit here tying the fate of humanity to the planet or not. I vote not. To me, that is more important than social problems, more important than ideology, that is the whole show. Well, we likely have centuries before we hit anything like a world-killing event. But when we do we have to be pretty advanced for it not to take the human race with it. I am not talking about some little colony on Mars.
But I digress. It is this building the astronauts practice for space flight on air-bearing floor, in tanks. They even practice food and hygiene.
The third stop is Space Park, really a tourist-only spot where you can see a few rockets close up.
We returned just in time Southwestern Bell sponsored briefing on an upcoming space flight. This was a shuttle launch on September 25. It begins with a robot from the future named 'Eva' telling us about what cutting edge communications technology changes were being implemented in our time. AT&T's management made the same mistake. They think we happen to be in a spurt of change right now. Their strategic imperative was to be the leader 'before, during, and after' the information revolution. Before is gone and there is no after. If they are pacing themselves like there is going to be an after I wish them luck. There is no after. I think the future will see this time as being towards the beginning of the chaos. Things are going to get really different. Probably better, but certainly different.
You see a piece of a Mars meteorite in a case. It isn't the Mars meteorite, but it is a Mars meteorite.
There is a short film 'On Human Destiny' showing the history of the space program. They show the Challenger explosion and move on. That's the right attitude. Don't let things come to a halt. People died crossing the prairie, they died in Vietnam, they died in the Gulf War, they die because they want to smoke and because they want to drink and they die because they want to travel on holiday weekends. You have to make space travel as safe as is feasible and then consider deaths the cost of doing business. We really need to get into space and we cannot let the fact that it is a dangerous job stop us. Life is dangerous, progress even more so.
After that there was a film Mission to Mir in the IMAX theater. In zero G with no up or down it looks like an Escher world on the Mir. I guess what is most exciting in the film is to see a Russian blast-off. We have seen American craft take off and their shapes are familiar. But it give sort of a science fictional feel you don't get from an American launch.
A Russian landing is very different from a United States one. They cannonball through the atmosphere, break their fall with a parachute. The last two seconds above the ground they fire rockets to break the fall. They still hit the ground pretty hard, but it is not hard enough to really hurt. If the cosmonauts have been out of Earth's gravity on the Mir they are treated as invalids for a day or so until their muscles get used to Earth's gravity again. The capsule is badly scorched from the re-entry. This is a quick and dirty way to do a touchdown on land. Americans, of course, come down only on water.
Also, the Mir is not kept as neat as the Skylab. In fact, they could not hide the fact that it got to be a sort of rat's nest inside. Of course, they are a lot bigger than Skylab is. Shannon Lucid lost a shoe for days and had to offer a reward for it before they Russians disassembled the floor panels to find where it drifted.
There are a bunch of exhibits intended to get kids excited about space. In one, kids ride a space buggy and see a moon landscape under he real space buggy moving past them. Really it is a little TV screen and when they push a control forward the buggy shakes and the screen runs the lunar film forward. Pulling back on the stick runs the film backward giving the feeling the buggy is backing up.
One computer program teaches you to design a multi-stage rocket to get maximum altitude. |
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