Last week I was in Houston, Texas, touring the Johnson Space Center (JSC) Visitor Center with a couple hundred other museum professionals during the American Association of Museums’ 2011 Annual Meeting.
The visitor center has terrific interactive exhibits about the space shuttle, a series of exciting films and tours, but the stars of the show are the artifacts from an incredible collection, including the actual Mercury Atlas 9 “Faith 7″ capsule flown by Gordon Cooper; the Gemini V Spacecraft piloted by Pete Conrad and Gordon Cooper; a Lunar Roving Vehicle Trainer; a full shuttle cockpit trainer; and moon rocks in a lunar geological vault. I was personally touched to see Astronaut Donald Peterson’s personal hygiene kit from Challenger’s maiden voyage, which included Dial deodorant – my father used to work for Armour-Dial Pharmaceuticals, and he was always proud to know that his company’s products were used for the space program.
But as we explored these incredible displays, our group began discussing what the future story of the JSC will be after the last space shuttle, Endeavor completes its mission in June of this year. NASA also just announced date for final space shuttle launch of Atlantis.
After all, this is the place where we watched – on live television – as NASA’s mission control put a man on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. We watched the best and brightest inventors, innovators, scientists, engineers, and project managers – world-class problem solvers – achieve what many deemed impossible.
As a nation, we watched the JSC work with in-flight astronauts to fix the Apollo 13 after an explosion damaged their vehicle; and we cheered with them as the astronauts returned home safely. We cried with them in 1986 when the Challenger shuttle exploded 73 seconds after launch, and we cried again in 2003 when the Columbia shuttle disintegrated over Texas during re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere. We all experienced their successes and learned from the failures of the largest program of innovation ever embarked upon by our modern society.
There are many heroes, innovators and pioneers in space exploration in the NASA program, and the JSC’s mission control was the home base for us to experience all those stories, together as a nation.
Many of us recounted our relationships to NASA’s history and wondered if the last shuttle launch will truly mean the end of NASA – and in particular, JSC’s history of human space flight.
My answer? Not necessarily.
There are commercial partner space programs such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which was awarded a NASA contract in April of this year to develop a revolutionary launch escape system for his company’s seven-passenger Dragon, which is intended to replace the current shuttle program. After all, the shuttle itself led to the development of Sky Lab and delivered the Hubble Telescope, making it possible for us to see what we believe to be the edge of our universe. How cool was that!
We still need space heroes like Musk to continue our journey into new frontiers, and our children certainly need science and technology heroes and experts that inspire them to pursue fields of technology, science, engineering and mathematics.
It is interesting how many times have we heard students say, “What will I use this math or science stuff for when I’m older?” Perhaps we could answer those questions with a trip to the JSC, or with the examples of heroes such as Buzz Aldrin, Charles Elachi, Neal Armstrong or Mark Kelly, who is commander of the Endeavor and currently in space on the last shuttle mission. I also believe Musk, Dean Kamen and others are our current science and technology heroes that imagine, innovate and inspire us to challenge ourselves to think differently, solve problems, have fun and achieve beyond what is expected of ourselves to build a better society.
That’s the right stuff.
Christian Overland
Executive Vice President
The Henry Ford
