NASA
We have been on the south side of Houston for a week now. We left the tidy CG in League City for one closer to this weekend’s geocaching event. It is kind of seedy, but has wifi and we have not spent much time here.
NASA was excellent. They have built a snazzy museum, sort of like your standard child oriented science museum so there are scads of kids of all ages there. Even more because it is Spring Break. Here in TX, colleges and schools all get out at the same time. Whoopee.
We got to go inside a mock up of the Space Shuttle’s command deck, enough switches to make you dizzy. Who could possibly remember what they were all for? We could see a scale model of the enormous cargo bay through a window. The Space Shuttle is really a truck, complete with a loading crane. The carrying capacity looks like it would be close to that of an 18 wheeler.
We also stood next to actual rockets, the first, small Atlas, then a bigger one, and finally the great sky engine, the Saturn. This lives, on its side in a building, all 4 stages pulled a bit apart and the sections that cover the engines left off so you can see them in all their metallic might. Each engine has a cone where the fire comes out and above that a mass of curving tubes, balls and wires that looks very organic, like metal guts. Think of a motorcycle engine on steroids. The whole rocket is huge, hundreds of feet long but for all that, it has a sort giant sleeping under a spell quality, as thought it might awake, stand up while the building shatters around it and begin the count down.
Next to all this propulsion muscle, the capsule that carried the astronauts is a tiny thing shaped like an outdoor flood light that sits on the top of all the might. It reminds me of the stunts of Evil Keneavel who propelled himself up in the air over things, usually on a motorcycle. Although the machinery and the engineering and the training of the astronauts carry a lot of gravitas, the act of actually sitting on top of a rocket and letting someone fire it up has a “hey, watch this, guys “ quality to it. I think that is why we have such an affection for all this space stuff, it really is the ultimate stunt.
We trollied into the actual space center, after having our pictures taken. This is billed as a security measure, but as they are selling prints for $20 I am suspicious. Our first stop was the old Mission Control where the Apollo flights were run. It looks kind of like a classroom, but has big screens on the front. The computer stations are a soft muddy green, and have no keyboards. You had to ask the mainframe for stuff by rolling some thumbwheels. There were only 26 screens of stuff to see each with 26 lines. There was a nice retiree who gave a good spiel about it all, and was most impressed to learn that Don had worked on Apollo, although not here in this room. There was a red phone, which during flights near earth was manned by a sufficiently senior military type to keep all aircraft, and boats out of the way of the project. This part of it all made it seem less like a stunt. There were hundreds of engineering types monitoring these flights, almost enough expertise to keep the rockets up on sheer force of brains. I remember seeing the grainy footage of Goddard’s early rocket launches in Worcester, skinny spindly things. Who would have imagined that they would evolve into the huge Saturn.
Next stop the big training area which has mock ups of the Shuttle and also all the pieces of the Space Station, including the Russian parts. Here the Astronauts practice doing everything imaginable, sometimes in their suits. Sometimes, we are told, when the ones in space are doing something tricky, someone on the ground is doing it here, to advise. There is no actually weightless training room here, only some vast tanks of water (which we didn’t see) or a trip in the “Vomit Comet”. This is a jet that goes up 20,000-30,000 feet fast, to produce 20 seconds of zero gravity at the top of what is basically a roller coaster ride. It will do this 30-40 times in one flight.
Next day, we did a geocaching attack on the city of Alvin. For some reason, there is a big concentration of people hiding here. Most of these caches are pretty public, so you have to be kind of casual about searching the area, and very subtle about retrieving it. Usually these are tiny ones with just a piece of paper to sign.
We went down to Galveston to do some more cacheing too. Galveston was a very important port back in the 1860’s-1880’s. It still has a lot of shipping, a container port, and a whole fleet of shrimp boats. There were three oil rig platforms crouching in the harbor like giant crabs, one retired and two being worked on by enormous cranes. The down town area has some really fantastic Victorian houses and churches, as well as simple houses that all have shutters that stay in place to keep the sun out. An attractive, tropical town. Down by the gulf side, like anywhere there is a beach, it is wall to wall stores and people driving up and down, and seafood places and T shirts and tattoo places and miles of hotels, condos. We drove west along the seawall until it ended, still some fancy developments out there, on stilts.
In 1900, a hurricane hit Galveston dead on and killed 8,000 people and pretty well destroyed most of the town. No way to get warning it was coming, and a great tidal surge came ashore turning the frame houses into smashed piles of lumber. One wonders why anyone would come back here to live after that.
Friday, Sat and Sunday we attended the Texas Challenge, a competitive geocaching event at a State park on the Brazos River. We were adopted by the Central Texas group, since we had spent the winter there. There were about 25 caches hidden just for this, each with points, plus some puzzles and three stage finds. We also had a picture of a tree that we had to find in the park. Instead of signing the paper, we had paper punches in different letters and a score card to collect them. Some of the more obsessed had dirt bikes and runners and plans. We were the slow team of our group, we had 4 kids and some older and larger folks, so we drove around in the back of our truck whooping and finding some caches, and feeling pretty relaxed about the whole thing. Others were paying attention and at the end, a fast runner took all 12 cards to run them to a distant cache for that punch. The runner cut it pretty close to the time deadline, so we had to do a lot of shouting. And, WE WON! No prize, but yet another excuse to whoop it up. There was a lot of food, and much chatting about the technology and the numbers people had amassed, and a class on the Geocacher Swiss Army Knife. This is a database that has been designed for cacheing and it is very complex and powerful.
This area was once full of sugar cane fields, the SW side of Houston is called Sugar Land, for the big plant run there by Imperial Sugar. I didn’t see any cane fields, I must have read about cane on the Brazos, in some western story. That has happened to me a number of times: I will hear the name of some Texas River and have a sort of frisson of emotion, as though I was near a place where something exciting happened. Alas, I don’t remember the story, but Texas is kind of like that, romantic notions around every corner.
The Brazos valley, and many of the other valleys west of here are fertile farming land, enormous wide flat fields for miles and miles. Away from the rivers, it is a great flat dried brush pasture. The height of the brush varies with the amount of topsoil and the amount of water, from knee high to 20’. We sometimes see cattle in the brush and cactus, mostly vary colored and brindled. The big metal gates and surrounding flanking gates of these ranches are usually painted one, earthtone color, with a metal cut out sign on the crosspiece. At the corners of the ranch property, there is another painted metal section to tell us the boundary.
I finally bought a Texas wildflower book ( the flowers are everywhere, a riot of colors ) and it says that this area of TX was once a grassy savanna, but over grazing let in the brushy junk. I think it is called chaparall, hence chaps that a cowboy would have to wear riding through it. A wild, inhospitable land.
NASA was excellent. They have built a snazzy museum, sort of like your standard child oriented science museum so there are scads of kids of all ages there. Even more because it is Spring Break. Here in TX, colleges and schools all get out at the same time. Whoopee.
We got to go inside a mock up of the Space Shuttle’s command deck, enough switches to make you dizzy. Who could possibly remember what they were all for? We could see a scale model of the enormous cargo bay through a window. The Space Shuttle is really a truck, complete with a loading crane. The carrying capacity looks like it would be close to that of an 18 wheeler.
We also stood next to actual rockets, the first, small Atlas, then a bigger one, and finally the great sky engine, the Saturn. This lives, on its side in a building, all 4 stages pulled a bit apart and the sections that cover the engines left off so you can see them in all their metallic might. Each engine has a cone where the fire comes out and above that a mass of curving tubes, balls and wires that looks very organic, like metal guts. Think of a motorcycle engine on steroids. The whole rocket is huge, hundreds of feet long but for all that, it has a sort giant sleeping under a spell quality, as thought it might awake, stand up while the building shatters around it and begin the count down.
Next to all this propulsion muscle, the capsule that carried the astronauts is a tiny thing shaped like an outdoor flood light that sits on the top of all the might. It reminds me of the stunts of Evil Keneavel who propelled himself up in the air over things, usually on a motorcycle. Although the machinery and the engineering and the training of the astronauts carry a lot of gravitas, the act of actually sitting on top of a rocket and letting someone fire it up has a “hey, watch this, guys “ quality to it. I think that is why we have such an affection for all this space stuff, it really is the ultimate stunt.
We trollied into the actual space center, after having our pictures taken. This is billed as a security measure, but as they are selling prints for $20 I am suspicious. Our first stop was the old Mission Control where the Apollo flights were run. It looks kind of like a classroom, but has big screens on the front. The computer stations are a soft muddy green, and have no keyboards. You had to ask the mainframe for stuff by rolling some thumbwheels. There were only 26 screens of stuff to see each with 26 lines. There was a nice retiree who gave a good spiel about it all, and was most impressed to learn that Don had worked on Apollo, although not here in this room. There was a red phone, which during flights near earth was manned by a sufficiently senior military type to keep all aircraft, and boats out of the way of the project. This part of it all made it seem less like a stunt. There were hundreds of engineering types monitoring these flights, almost enough expertise to keep the rockets up on sheer force of brains. I remember seeing the grainy footage of Goddard’s early rocket launches in Worcester, skinny spindly things. Who would have imagined that they would evolve into the huge Saturn.
Next stop the big training area which has mock ups of the Shuttle and also all the pieces of the Space Station, including the Russian parts. Here the Astronauts practice doing everything imaginable, sometimes in their suits. Sometimes, we are told, when the ones in space are doing something tricky, someone on the ground is doing it here, to advise. There is no actually weightless training room here, only some vast tanks of water (which we didn’t see) or a trip in the “Vomit Comet”. This is a jet that goes up 20,000-30,000 feet fast, to produce 20 seconds of zero gravity at the top of what is basically a roller coaster ride. It will do this 30-40 times in one flight.
Next day, we did a geocaching attack on the city of Alvin. For some reason, there is a big concentration of people hiding here. Most of these caches are pretty public, so you have to be kind of casual about searching the area, and very subtle about retrieving it. Usually these are tiny ones with just a piece of paper to sign.
We went down to Galveston to do some more cacheing too. Galveston was a very important port back in the 1860’s-1880’s. It still has a lot of shipping, a container port, and a whole fleet of shrimp boats. There were three oil rig platforms crouching in the harbor like giant crabs, one retired and two being worked on by enormous cranes. The down town area has some really fantastic Victorian houses and churches, as well as simple houses that all have shutters that stay in place to keep the sun out. An attractive, tropical town. Down by the gulf side, like anywhere there is a beach, it is wall to wall stores and people driving up and down, and seafood places and T shirts and tattoo places and miles of hotels, condos. We drove west along the seawall until it ended, still some fancy developments out there, on stilts.
In 1900, a hurricane hit Galveston dead on and killed 8,000 people and pretty well destroyed most of the town. No way to get warning it was coming, and a great tidal surge came ashore turning the frame houses into smashed piles of lumber. One wonders why anyone would come back here to live after that.
Friday, Sat and Sunday we attended the Texas Challenge, a competitive geocaching event at a State park on the Brazos River. We were adopted by the Central Texas group, since we had spent the winter there. There were about 25 caches hidden just for this, each with points, plus some puzzles and three stage finds. We also had a picture of a tree that we had to find in the park. Instead of signing the paper, we had paper punches in different letters and a score card to collect them. Some of the more obsessed had dirt bikes and runners and plans. We were the slow team of our group, we had 4 kids and some older and larger folks, so we drove around in the back of our truck whooping and finding some caches, and feeling pretty relaxed about the whole thing. Others were paying attention and at the end, a fast runner took all 12 cards to run them to a distant cache for that punch. The runner cut it pretty close to the time deadline, so we had to do a lot of shouting. And, WE WON! No prize, but yet another excuse to whoop it up. There was a lot of food, and much chatting about the technology and the numbers people had amassed, and a class on the Geocacher Swiss Army Knife. This is a database that has been designed for cacheing and it is very complex and powerful.
This area was once full of sugar cane fields, the SW side of Houston is called Sugar Land, for the big plant run there by Imperial Sugar. I didn’t see any cane fields, I must have read about cane on the Brazos, in some western story. That has happened to me a number of times: I will hear the name of some Texas River and have a sort of frisson of emotion, as though I was near a place where something exciting happened. Alas, I don’t remember the story, but Texas is kind of like that, romantic notions around every corner.
The Brazos valley, and many of the other valleys west of here are fertile farming land, enormous wide flat fields for miles and miles. Away from the rivers, it is a great flat dried brush pasture. The height of the brush varies with the amount of topsoil and the amount of water, from knee high to 20’. We sometimes see cattle in the brush and cactus, mostly vary colored and brindled. The big metal gates and surrounding flanking gates of these ranches are usually painted one, earthtone color, with a metal cut out sign on the crosspiece. At the corners of the ranch property, there is another painted metal section to tell us the boundary.
I finally bought a Texas wildflower book ( the flowers are everywhere, a riot of colors ) and it says that this area of TX was once a grassy savanna, but over grazing let in the brushy junk. I think it is called chaparall, hence chaps that a cowboy would have to wear riding through it. A wild, inhospitable land.
posted by Thistledown24 at 4:04 PM
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