If you’ve ever watched a space launch on the tube you know that after the rocket takes off from Cape Canaveral, “Houston” drives the rest of the way: The Johnson Space Center. Named after Lyndon Baines Johnson, the ex-President from, oddly enough, Texas.
Originally a mosquito laden marsh in the urban terrarium called Houston, the Johnson Space Center has been the wheels of the space program since Gemini IX.
Taking the tour is a little like being hit over the head with Corporate America. The tram is sponsored by Chevron, Mazda is the Corporate Partner (new car displays everywhere in the place) and Pepsi is the Corporate Drink. A bunch of other shills sponsor everything from door knobs to displays of space suits.
I didn’t check out the washrooms, but I would not be surprised to see “This square of toilet tissue brought to you by Frito-Lay – When you wipe your ass, think of Fritos!” This corporate pimping we can overlook, as NASA’s budget for preserving history is about the same as my budget for opera tickets. NASA puts the cash where it makes the biggest impact: Safety, Research and Flights.
Of the tour, the highlight is really the Mission Control Center, now called the Historical MCC. Mission Control Center is smaller than a high school auditorium, a raked floor and those grey-green government consoles for technology arrayed in ranks towards the wall of big displays that were FutureForward in 1966.
It was the room where you saw Neil Armstrong step onto the Moon, where you heard “Houston, we’ve got a problem” and where you saw faces agape when the Challenger exploded. This is The Room. You can see the ghosts of Chris Craft, Gene Kranz, Deke Slayton and Werner Von Braun.
On Rocket Row they have displays of some of the early technology, a Redstone (Mercury program) a test rig Little Joe (a post WWII rocket, testing the escape tower for Apollo) and a full Saturn V on its side. The whole site has been baked in the Texas sun for too many years and is showing its age, with peeling paint and warping metal, but the artefacts are there: It’s the real deal from the days of Gordo and Neil and Mike and Gus and Ed and Wally and Al.
Could America ever crank up that kind of show again? Probably not. The Environuts would decry loss of wetland habitat, scientists would debate the utility of the effort, while limousine liberals would do the math and cry that we could feed and educate millions of inner city kids with the money, while simultaneously cutting programs to the cities.
I wish we could do another space program. Not because of the money, but because, it shows what humans can do when they’re given a challenge and the tools to make it happen.
RoadDave 
I saw a show recently, one of whose guests was an Apollo astronaut – 14, if I recall correctly. He mentioned he had recently bought a digital camera with an 8GB memory card, and that was 200,000 TIMES the memory capacity of Apollo’s Command Module computers.
What we did was amazing. More so, when you consider how much money was being fed into the Vietnam War. Unfortunately, I agree with you, David. This is beyond our current fractious nature. Maybe if we could convince some Muslim radicals that Allah would destroy the West if they could get a Muslim to Mars, then come back with that as a threat. Then again, the ACLU would probably determine that sending someone to Mars was violating the civil rights of the Martians…..