Houston Space Center

The Space Center at Houston is worth visiting. I’d never seen a Saturn V in person. It’s amazing. It’s also sad to see the corroded electronic cards and chassis; you start to wonder if we could ever do it again. Well, Artemis/Orion has launched once, but there’s not the same drive or, I fear, vision.

We had an overhead tour of the training area. One section of the floor had gratifyingly cluttered benches and desks, but quite a bit of the area’s desks were clean. The spiel of the guide on the tram included the cheerful assertion that the goal was to have a woman person of color on the Moon.

NASA has a bit of a history of trumpeting its "firsts", no matter the details or the significance, so this kind of foolishness has some precedent. But in an era of greater budget squeezes and no great obvious public enthusiasm for the project (or, I'm afraid, clear science or exploration objectives), it seems remarkably stupid to advertise a science/technology project as a social engineering project. The people most interested in "diversity and reparations quotas" would find this a rather inefficient use of money–much better if the money went to projects easier for them to govern.

On the brighter side, there must have been about 400 youngsters there from schools in Texas and several nations south of the border, in brightly color-coded shirts, apparently having a blast. The James Webb lecture was a LCD talk, but with some gorgeous before and after photos. There were lots of hands-on things for the kids, and some of the grownups, and tons of artifacts.

One thing they can do better is the signage. What’s there is OK, but if, for example, alongside the "this is a rocket nozzle from a Saturn V" they had a second poster with a line drawing of the nozzle with important parts labeled, that would satisfy the “general interest” people, but also give more explanation for those who are curious how the thing actually worked. (They often has a provenance explanation.)

Come to think of it, a display of how a rocket motor works is something I didn’t see there. It would best be shown with an animation–several stations for the different kinds of rocket. Maybe I just missed that section–it’s a large place. "How a simple rocket works" could be another display–like a water rocket. It might be too mechanically complex to be a reliable exhibit, though. But…

You’d need a clear plastic rocket (replaced regularly thanks to fatigue), captive to a guide rod. (Or maybe inside a clear pipe? Wear would make the pipe less than transparent after a while). At the bottom something presses it down (a hold-down) onto a plug that corks the bottom of the rocket. Through the plug run two tubes, one long and reaching almost to the top of the inside of the rocket (for air), and the other just inside the bottom (for water). Open the air valve to let air escape, and force water in at the bottom. Then shut the water valve, and force air in until the rocket is pressurized. Release the hold-down, and the air forces the water out and the rocket flies up to the top of the exhibit.

The constraining device would wear (or the rocket plastic distort), and eventually the rocket wouldn’t fall exactly back down where it ought to–so you’d need some guides at the bottom of the system to encourage the rocket to land properly. And some sensors so you don’t have to rely on timing to bring the hold-down into action (suppose wear on the constraining tube makes the rocket fall too slowly). And if this can be cycled once a minute, that’s about 600 launches a day–which is likely beyond the endurance of the toy models. NASA has bunches of engineers–or used to, anyway--so this should be solvable.

Another thing that cried out for explanation was why the instrument panel control switches had guards around them. Adults can guess, if they didn’t know already, but a sentence to explain it to the kids would be nice.

Also, a cartoon of what banks of instrument switches were for what would be nice for adults too. When you can’t read the labels it looks like this.

The atmosphere was upbeat–no mentions of why things failed when they failed, unless it was accompanied by a description of how they managed to fix it (e.g. the solar panel on Skylab, or the CO2 scrubber on Apollo 13.

I’m glad we went.