I awoke early on Wednesday morning at the Westin Galleria Houston Hotel in anticipation of my visit to the George H. W. Bush Presidential Center. But, first things first. As a Marriott Bonvoy Lifetime Platinum Elite member, I had access to the Club Lounge located on the 24th floor and so I went up to enjoy a bit of breakfast before my journey to College Station. A smiling and very friendly server greeted me upon entering the space, which occupied a corner of the top floor with a good many windows overlooking the city’s Uptown District. The club was divided into a dining area with a number of tables and chairs, as well as a countertop running the length of two walls and a sitting area with comfortable sofas and overstuffed armchairs. In the morning, pastries, cereals, yogurt and fruit were self-serve and the club lounge also offered eggs, bacon and breakfast potatoes. Whenever the server would present a plate to a guest, she would loudly proclaim, “Yummy, Yummy,” which invariably brought a smile to everyone's face.
The Hertz Rental Car Office was in the lobby and much easier to find than the one in the Los Angeles Airport Marriott that gave me so much trouble last October. Kudos to Ali, the agent behind the desk, who let me know that I could enjoy complimentary parking overnight in the rental car area of the adjacent garage since I had reserved a two-day rental. As I was inputing GPS directions into my phone, I discovered that icy road conditions existed that morning in College Station and the temperatures were not expected to exceed 33° the entire day. Dallas and Austin were also experiencing rough weather at that time with any number of roadway accidents attributed to the poor conditions. Checking the forecast for the next day, I learned it would be much warmer, so I decided to head south and visit the NASA Johnson Space Center on that Wednesday and save the Bush Library for the following day. It proved to be an excellent decision.
Traffic was busy that morning amidst heavy rain on I-45 southbound (much better than the ice and snow up north). Ironically, the news broadcast informed me that very day of February 1st was the twentieth anniversary of the Space Shuttle Columbia’s disintegration on reentry over Texas and Louisiana. This was a sobering reminder of the risks associated with space flight and the courage exhibited by those chosen few selected to venture beyond our atmosphere. Upon arrival, just outside the main entrance to the Space Center, stood a beautiful Boeing 747, the largest single artifact saved from NASA's Space Shuttle Program. It’s one of two original jumbo jets that ferried the shuttle orbiters across the country between missions and is the actual aircraft obtained from American Airlines which I mentioned in my post of January 7 titled How the Boeing 747 Carried the Space Shuttle. Making the 8-story-tall exhibit appear even larger was the addition of a full-size replica of the Space Shuttle Independence (more on that later).
NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) is a huge and very interesting complex. It occupies 1,620 acres southeast of downtown Houston, in the Clear Lake area. JSC is the home of mission control and astronaut training. In its early days, the center led the Gemini, Apollo, Apollo-Soyuz and Skylab Projects. It’s now home to America’s astronaut corps, Mission Control Center, International Space Station, Orion and Gateway Programs and its more than 10,000 civil service and contractor employees. My first stop was the Destiny Theater where the historic film “Human Destiny” was shown. The film chronicles the events leading up to the formation of NASA and the programs that led to our successful missions to the Moon and beyond. The Destiny Theater is also home to an historic artifact - the very podium used by President John F. Kennedy during his now-famous September 12, 1962 speech at Rice University, given to bolster public support for his proposal to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth before the close of that decade.
Each general admission ticket included a tram tour and I chose the 90-minute tour to the Historic Mission Control Center. The only drawback was riding in the open-air tram for the seven-minute ride in 30-some degree weather. But, it was a great educational experience. In 2011, the center was named in honor of Christopher C. Kraft, Jr., the American aerospace engineer who served as NASA’s first Flight Director. In the early days of America’s space program, he developed the now-familiar concept of a mission control center to monitor human spaceflight. When all the occupants of our tram were inside the building, we walked up the 87 steps to take our seats outside the glass-walled seating area once used by the crews' families, other members of the astronaut corps, the media and various VIPs. From here, we enjoyed a fourteen minute multi-media presentation covering the events of Apollo 11's historic July 20, 1969 moon landing in real time. The room was set up to look exactly as it did on that day, including ash trays overflowing with cigarette butts and the actual computer equipment used during both the Gemini and Apollo missions. We learned that when the NASA astronauts approached the moon over 50 years ago, much was riding on a computer with less than eighty kilobytes of memory. By contrast, the iPhone in my pocket had more than 100,000 times more processing power! By today’s standards, that vintage NASA computer with its monitors and rotary dials was a dinosaur, but it was revolutionary for its time.
Following an overpriced, but filling lunch at the Food Lab, I explored Independence Plaza, the outdoor $12 million exhibit presented by Boeing with the B747 and orbiter mock-up mentioned earlier in this post. Almost four years in the making, Independence Plaza is the only place in the world where the public can see a (mock) space shuttle atop a Boeing 747 jetliner and be able to go inside both. NASA's retired space shuttle orbiters and its second Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, NASA 911, are on display at other museums across the nation, but those vehicles can only be viewed from their outside. Inside the mock Space Shuttle Independence however, I was able to tour a detailed replica of the orbiter's two-level crew cabin. On the flight deck, the controls the commander and pilot used to fly the shuttle were visible and on the mid-deck, visitors were permitted to enter the crew quarters as well as the payload bay. A hands-on museum now fills the length of the jumbo jet's fuselage, giving a look back at the history of the space shuttle and how a jumbo jet was able to fly the orbiters between the landing and launch sites. We also had an opportunity to view the original flying scale model of the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft that convinced NASA a jetliner could carry an orbiter piggyback style.
NASA is busily preparing to return to the Moon and I spent the balance of the afternoon learning more about their Artemis and Gateway Missions. Three Artemis missions are currently in progress. Artemis I was an un-crewed lunar orbital test flight launched last November, flying 1.3 million miles and marking the return of the agency to lunar exploration. Artemis II is planned for next year and will be the first scheduled crew mission beyond the Moon, when the Orion Spacecraft will perform a lunar flyby test taking humans the furthest we’ve ever been in space. Artemis III, on the docket for launch in 2025, will mark humanity’s first return to the lunar surface in more than 50 years. NASA will make history by sending the first humans to explore the region near the lunar South Pole performing scientific studies for a week on the surface. The Gateway, a vital component of the Artemis Program, will later serve as a multi-purpose outpost orbiting the Moon. It will provide essential support for long-term human return to the lunar surface and serve as a staging point for deep space exploration. The first two elements of the Gateway, the Power and Propulsion Element and the Habitation and Logistics Outpost, are planed to fly up on a Falcon Heavy Rocket within the next few years. It will take about a year to reach the Moon using solar electricity power propulsion.
With more than four hundred space artifacts, a number of permanent and temporary exhibitions, as well as a variety of learning experiences and theaters, NASA’s Johnson Space Center was well worth my time and I would recommend it to any aviation enthusiast visiting the Houston area.
Until next time…safe travels.
Wow - sounds like a brilliant centre, and I will bet that you were grinning from ear to ear examining the internals of the Shuttle and Boeing!