Houston, We Have a Problem

[October 2018]

While working out the logistics of transportation and lodging for my first conference as a grad student, it was discovered that flying there on the day the conference started would cost over a hundred dollars more than flying a day earlier. Plus we’d have to fly out of Detroit at five or six in the morning. Since I was planning to travel with another student and split the cost of the hotel room, we decided to travel to Houston a day early and spend some time doing things outside of the hotel. We left Detroit at 8:45 on a grey forty-five-degree morning and emerged in Houston three hours later to sunshine, humidity, and eighty-five-degree temperatures.

There were only a couple things I wanted to accomplish with our extra free day in Houston: 1) go to Space Center Houston and 2) have Texas barbeque. In order to achieve these goals, we opted to rent a car, which turned out to be a great decision. Texas is not made for walking. Everything is miles apart, and even the things that are close together are separated by ten-lane roads with no crosswalks as far as the eye can see. So if you’re ever travelling to Houston and get advice to rent a car if you’re going anywhere more than twenty feet from your hotel, take it.

Mission Control

From the airport, we drove to the space center, stopping for semi-authentic tacos for lunch on the way. After paying for tickets, we were advised at the information desk to line up for the tram tour first to make sure we made it on to a tour. There are two tram tours, one that focuses more on the astronaut training facilities, and one that goes to mission control. We ended up in the line for the mission control tour, which drives through some of the NASA campus before stopping at the mission control center, named for Chris Kraft, a former flight director who was later director of the Manned Spacecraft Center (now the Johnson Space Center). We didn’t get to directly see the controllers working (we saw them on a TV screen), but we did see the room where they train them for the ISS (International Space Station). It still looks similar to the control rooms from the 60s that sent astronauts to the moon, except the computers are smaller and there’s less cigar smoke.

Saturn V

Following the guided part of the tour, we were dropped off at Rocket Park, where they have a collection of (surprise) rockets – Little Joe, a Mercury-Redstone, and a Saturn V. Little Joe was used for unmanned tests of the Mercury capsule. The Redstone was used for suborbital Project Mercury flights; it was followed by the Atlas for orbital Mercury flights, the Titan II for Project Gemini, the Saturn IB for unmanned testing of the Apollo modules and Apollo 7, and finally the Saturn V for the remaining Apollo flights. After seeing the Saturn V – it’s the length of a football field and had a building specially built for it – we caught the tram back to the space center.

Training shuttle + 747

The indoor exhibits there include information on Mars missions, some of the items used by astronauts on the ISS, and post-Apollo space activity – Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz, the shuttle and ISS. We also saw a film on an ISS EVA (extravehicular activity, or spacewalk) gone wrong, which was interesting. The last exhibit we saw was outdoors. They have a modified Boeing 747 used as a shuttle carrier aircraft with a (mockup) shuttle attached. The 747 was stripped of almost all its passenger seats and reinforced where the shuttle was attached, and is now filled with exhibits about the conception and development of the idea to use a plane to carry the space shuttle. It’s pretty cool; there are three levels you can walk through, the first being the 747 and the top two in the shuttle itself. Once we finished this, we had seen most of the space center, so we headed off for dinner. (Barbeque, a long wait, but this was our best chance to get Texas barbeque since we spent the rest of the week carless and in the hotel. It was worth the wait for brisket.) As for the space center, if you have any interest at all in space, Space Center Houston gets a definite go from me.