NASA excursion

Last weekend, while we were in Houston, we swung by Space Center Houston, the touristy interactive museum/money trap that now serves as the gateway to the LBJ Space Center. Calista and Keela love it, and now that they've added an elaborate playland, the girls find it even more exciting. But mostly they're attracted to the rockets and spaceships. I have to admit that despite a certain degree of cheesyness, Space Center Houston is a vast improvement over the utter lack of a visitor center Johnson used to boast. A decade ago, you'd drive up and park, and beyond the famous Rocket Park, there just wasn't much to see.



Here Calista and I are checking out a mockup of the Apollo/Soyuz docking collar that was used to link the two spacecraft during the 1975 test project. There's even a fairly lifelike mannequin of Tom Stafford floating inside (at least, I hope it's a mannequin!). The full-scale Skylab trainer is just off to our right, and walking through it I can't help but think Skylab was better-designed, more efficient and a better dollar value than the current ISS.



Here Calista, Keela and I take a look at Faith 7, the Mercury spacecraft that carried Gordon Cooper in orbit in the final flight of the Mercury program. Just a few moments before, we'd walked through Skylab, then looked at the Apollo 17 command module, followed by Gemini V. Calista was decidedly unimpressed by the steady reduction in size of the ships, declaring that Gemini was too small even for she and Keela to play in. You can imagine her reaction to the tiny Mercury capsule.



One thing I go out of my way to do is show the girls female role models in all walks of life, so they don't develop a "Girls can't do this" mindset. Right now, Calista's career goals include becoming an astro-paleontologist, so she can hunt for fossils on Mars. I think that's a mighty fine career choice. She's already got one book about Ride, and here we got to look at the jumpsuit Ride wore on the shuttle mission where she became the first U.S. woman in space (Keela's hiding behind the display kiosk). I haven't told Calista about the Mercury 13 yet, but we'll get there, eventually.

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