Complex Numbers

Reach for the Skies

Almost done with February's "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+]. Today's randomly selected photo prompt can be found here: To The Skies  

It should come as no surprise to anyone who's been following along here that one of the highlights of my life was visiting the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

I've been to the more famous one in Florida, too, of course. That one's close enough to Disney World for a lot of Disney World to have rubbed off on it. Lines for the ticket booths were long but well-ordered, the whole thing was set up as a tourist trap, and it was highly kid-oriented. I fully expected to see employees dressed up as planets taking pictures with families.

It's not terrible, mind you, and I'm glad I went to see one of the world's few spaceports. But its emphasis on mass appeal made it less interesting than its counterpart in Texas.

Of the two, Houston is way more appealing to me because it's geekier. Part of the tour involved going into the room where people handled the first Moon landing (among other flights). Having seen the room in action, live, numerous times as a kid, I was just excited to be standing there in Mission Control.

Another important thing in Houston was they had a hangar specifically for storing one of the Saturn V rockets. Even if you know, from reading or looking at size comparisons or whatever, how big that sucker was, it's pretty incredible to stand next to it (it's stored on its side, but still).

That's the vehicle that took dudes to the Moon, which makes it the most significant machine in human history.

And sure, they're using a different rocket now. Things improve and evolve, like how the Hubble Space Telescope is replaced by the JWST, which in no way diminishes the advancements made by Hubble. I expect this new rocket even has an onboard computer more advanced than the pocket calculator the Apollo missions used, and its Mission Control might be using more than slide rules.

It's quite likely that society will collapse soon, and all of this will be lost. But for a brief few years, we really did shoot for the Moon.