SORRY FOR THIS BEING A VERY LONG POST, I'LL TRY TO BE MORE REGULAR AND CONCISE IN FUTURE, HA! ;)
Tuesday – 6.30am comes as a shock to the system to those of us
not used to it. But I’ve said it before and I will keep saying it until people
actually believe me, I do like getting
up early, I’m just rubbish at it. I got ready and was downstairs by 7, it
really doesn’t take me too long to get ready anymore and when I’m properly
awake it’s only a fifteen minute ordeal by now. I’m pretty sure this little
amount of time has come about for two reasons over the years; Mum waking up
late when I was little, so having to rush to be on time for school, and then me
waking up late for college/sacrificing looking good for sleep. Breakfasted and
ready, Rob kindly drove me to the Lyndon B Johnson Space Centre, around an hour
away. I wasn’t aware it was called this, knowing it only as Houston Space Centre.
Spent the ride talking about how he had
met my Dad for the first time when he went into Debenhams when Rob was working
there, in the 80s I think, to buy a TV. Apparently Dad was wearing skin tight
white jeans, cowboy boots, a ‘loud’ shirt, a cowboy hat, and had an afro. You
always have been a trend setter then hey Dad? ;)
After a bit of a delay getting away, traffic and confusion
with the satnav, we ended up getting there about 9.15am. This was fine, even
though it didn’t open until 10 I spent some time reading my book and watching
the squirrels run about like mad. At around 10.15, I finished my chapter and
went in, armed with my pre-printed ticket (you save $5 by doing it at home,
yay!) and was suddenly lost. A woman handed me a map and scanned my ticket, but
then I was on my own, in what seemed to be a massive round museum/exhibition centre/children’s
play area. The woman at the door had mentioned something about Starship Gallery
introduction film, that I was a little late but to just go in the back. Could I
find ‘the back’? Could I heck. I even followed a couple who looked like they
knew where they were going, but I think it creeped them out because I lost
them. I went back out to the front of the exhibit and realised there was
another showing at 10.45. I decided to wait, so plonked myself back down with
my book.
At this point I was approached by an old man who seemed to
work there. He asked me about my book and we chatted for a little while. Turns
out he’s 93 years old! I couldn’t believe it. He was a volunteer at the space centre.
He told me all about how he was in the American Air Force in WW2 and that in
fact his plane was supposed to drop the 3rd atomic bomb, scheduled
on the 15th August, but the Japanese surrended on the 14th!
Some people say it was the 13th they surrended but either way it’s a
bit close for comfort! He said I reminded him of his dear wife had passed away
20 years ago, because she always had her nose in a book. He described her as a
“lovely old girl”. There’s something very plain yet beautiful about that, in
the way he could have called her beautiful, amazing, any more powerful word,
but there was more love in the way he said “lovely old girl” than I could
imagine. He then gave me a card and told me that a woman had written a book
about his time in the air force and invited me to a book signing if I wanted to
buy a book, I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I didn’t have any money.
By the time we’d finished talking, it was time to go into
the film. There was only me and a couple in there, who I think were British,
but maybe I was imagining that accent. The film was just an overview of space
missions but it was well put together and it gave me a feeling that carried on
building throughout the day, I’ll explain in a minute. What was pretty cool is
that at the front, under the screen, was the lecture from which President Kennedy
made his famous speech regarding the moon, containing the quotation:
“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade
and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
After the film, we exited to the opposite side and into a dark room,
lit up by lots of little lights to look like stars. Hanging around were a mix
of replica and real satellites and shuttles. A timeline of all NASA space
missions, with a few mementos like gloves and tools. I also found out that my
Dad shares a name with an astronaut – when he’s been saying he’s been going
offshore all this time, he really was far far offshore! Ha! It made me chuckle
anyhow. I then went through to ‘the vault’ and learnt about how space rocks are
examined, and even touched a bit of real moon rock! Read a bit about helium-3
and how there are ideas to use is as a fuel source for Earth, an issue I’m
divided over.
The next
section was really cool, it had lots of spacesuits in it, as well as a big wall
explaining about the chemicals in space. Then a full scale replica of the Skylab.
It was really interesting to step inside and have things literally all around
you, of course all wall/floor space can be utilised in space, and it’s not as
if you’re walking on anything!
I finished
with this exhibit and made my way over to the Tram Tours running over to the
real, functional, space centre. For the second time that day my bag was
searched and I got on the tram. The first thing I realised was that our tour
guide had a stammer. I don’t intend to be mean, she was knowledgeable and a
nice girl, but do you think tour guiding is really a good job for someone with
a stammer? In a way, I’m impressed she has the confidence to do it, but I can almost
guarantee she was hired on the basis of equality and diversity. Our first stop
was at mission control, where we climbed the stairs to the famous control room,
with the green consoles, where the famous words were spoken “Houston, we have a
problem.” A few little facts about the room; (1) the screens aren’t computers, they’re
just regular TVs. Although the control room had lots and lots of information
fed to it through these screens, it could do little but convey that information
to the astronauts so computers were unnecessary. (2) The red phone in there is
not a direct line to the President, but a direct line to the Navy so they could
go and position themselves to pick up returning shuttles in the ocean. (3) Ron
Howard planned to film Apollo 13 using the actual control room, but it was too
small (it’s a lot smaller than it looks), so instead Hollywood completely
recreated it, a little bigger, in a studio and had some workers go examine it.
Apparently it was perfect, so perfect that when one of the workers needed the
bathroom, he forgot where he was and went in the direction of where the
bathroom was in the real room, only to find a door with nothing behind it.
Also whilst in this building I learnt that
there are 6 American flags on the moon. No idea why they need so many, but
whatever. 6 flags must mean they beat the Russians, right? Pft. The tour
guide also told us about how conspiracy theorists use the flag blowing in the
wind as a reason that the moon landing was faked. She explained how actually,
the pole in the top of the flag going horizontally had split, giving it that
look of waving. NASA liked it, so purposefully broke all future flags in the
same place. That first flag was also a last minute thought, as they sent an
office hand down to a local Sears on the day of the launch to pick up some American
flags. The ‘green room’ is now out of use, but we saw a live feed of the
current control room.
After here
we jumped back on the tram and headed over to the Space Vehicle Mock-up
Facility (SVMF). In this gigantic hanger are recreations of the International
Space Station, obiters and other shuttles to allow astronauts to familiarise
themselves with their surroundings before leaving. It was amazing to see the
pure scale of everything. The mock-ups
were perfect to the last stroke. Further down the hanger, we saw Canadarm, a
crane like machine used to move things around in space. In space, of course the
lack of gravity allows astronauts to push very heavy objects with no problem.
To get a similar effect for practice on Earth, NASA had created what I can only
describe as an air hockey table as big as a sports hall, so the upward surge of
air would give the object a ‘weightless’ effect.
We moved onto the Rocket Park after that, but not before pausing in front of a circle of trees planted for astronauts who had sadly died. The Rocket Park was full scale replicas of rockets – super cool!
When we
arrived back at the visitor’s area, I made my way across to some interactive
things where I failed at landing an obiter and failed to adequately prepare for
a trip to Mars, I don’t think space is my calling. Watched a woman do a talk on
‘Life in Space’ and how things we think are so simple are made difficult, from
keeping your underwear in the drawer to going to the toilet! Most of it just
involved strapping stuff, and yourself, down. It was a good talk, inside the cross
section of a mock living module of the ISS. After this I took a look around a life size model of an orbiter, so many buttons!
Then I headed over the ‘Blast Off’. It started with us all being packed into a dark room, and then suddenly TV screens lighting up around us, preparing for a blast off. Lights were flashing and as blast off happened, the whole room filled with smoke! Some doors opened and we went through into another theatre type area, where a woman who clearly knew her stuff talked about what was happening right now in space exploration, and showed us the path of the ISS right now and who is aboard it.
By this
time it was 5pm and the centre was closing! It was only at this point that I
realised the place had wifi – duh! So I sat outside and waited for Rob whilst
Facebooking. I’m left with mixed feelings. I fully support space exploration,
it’s amazing, but I do not support space excavation as much. I heard a lot of
words like ‘colonise’ and ‘extract’, who are we to be colonising anywhere when
we can hardly look after our own planet? And what gives us the right to
colonise Mars? There’s lots of talk too about the use of fuel found it space.
To me this implys that we’re just going to use up all our natural resources here
then move onto those of another planet without even exploring alternatives.
There are ways of us making energy with using natural resources, we’re just too
lazy to try them, we’d rather mine from another finite source. What about when
that runs out? Mini-rant over.
When we were driving home, Rob pointed out the
oil refineries, which stretched as far as I could see in both directions, it
was incredible. There’s a lot of money in Texas, I think Rob told me a 1/3 of
the USA’s fuel is refined here in Houston.
 |
| Here I am as an astronaut! |
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Wednesday – Slept in by accident, so didn’t
end up doing much during the day except for talking to people at home,
including Mum which was lovely as always. But in the evening me and Nancy had a
little pyjama party whilst Marie went and had her hair done. We made cakes and
danced around the living room, it was fun! Oh something important did happen
yesterday, I sent in my University application!
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Thursday- Ended up reading until 4am this
morning, but at I finished Angels and Demons and absolutely loved it. Going to
Barnes and Noble tomorrow for another book because I’ve ran out. Awake at 9am,
up at 10am. But that wasn’t before checking facebook at 4am to see my best
friend’s husband post something about waiting around in the hospital. At this
point it didn’t click that at home, it was 10am, so I thought it was 4am and my
best friend was in hospital. Oh, what I didn’t mention is that Nikki is
pregnant with just 5 weeks to go! So my immediate thought was that she’d gone
into labour! Turns out it was a regular check-up, at a regular hour. Silly time
difference got me confused and worried in the early hours. When I did wake up,
I showered and made scrambled eggs for breakfast. Decided to do something
outside today, so after speaking to Vicki on Skype for a bit, I took a bike
ride to Starbucks. It’s only a mile and a half away, but bear in mind three
things; I do not know this area, it’s hot as balls outside and finally, bikes
are not my strong point. But encouraged by Sundays trip, I printed out a Google
maps directions of the trails and set off in the heat. I was so grateful I
printed out that map, and the trails were beautiful. I love how they’re not
right next to the street and almost have a law unto themselves with regards to
etiquette and how things are signposted. I finally got to Starbucks 40 minutes
later, the directions had said 12, but then I did get lost a couple of times.
The very nice man who served me gave me half off my Vanilla Latte for being
‘British and cute’, a perk I could get used to! So I sat in Starbucks, sipping
my cheap coffee and talking to Nikki back home. It was a lovely way to spend an
hour. Then I realised the time and that if I got lost on the way home, Marie
would get there and not be able to get in the house. Jumped back on the bike
and I was off, breakneck speed. Okay, not breakneck, but faster than planned. I
ended up getting back with plenty of time, typical.
Tonight, we
went to watch Ellie’s high school football game! By 'we' I mean myself, Rob,
Marie, Nancy and two of Rob’s colleagues who are in town, Nick who is from
Wales and a very polite Japanese man whose name I can’t say let alone spell.
Ellie’s in the military marching band for Kingwood High School. I can’t say I
understood what was going on in the actual game of football, but the whole
thing was an amazing show! The band, the cheerleaders, the fillies (dancers),
the yell leaders – it really was a show at halftime! People ran around with
flags throughout the whole thing, t-shorts were thrown into the crowd; people
were really excited to be there! It’s not even comparable to the dozen
grumbling parents who stand on the side of the English football pitch on a
Saturday morning in the rain. Everything was done with such accuracy and skill
and talent, I really was in awe! Majorly impressed. There were food stands,
programmes being sold, people with painted faces and almost everyone was
wearing a Kingwood shirt. The Kingwood Mustangs ended up losing, but that meant
nothing to me, I’d just enjoyed the show... talk about school spirit!
Sorry about
the super long post, I must try to update often when exciting things happen. In
other news, I composed a list of things to do before I die, or at least started
one. Maybe I’ll make a page here for it at some point...
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