The Good
- On the Saturn V hall: The MOCR station they force you through as you enter. I sketched that exhibit out. Like, not perfectly. But very, very close. Parallel thinking, yaknow? They had a similar setup for Mercury in the Hall of Heroes (as they called it). What it is, they have MOCR set up like the guys who work there just... left. They aren't there, but you can hear the recordings. More than that, you see their screens working. You feel their "ghosts" so to speak. You see more information on overhead or surrounding screens. If I'd designed the Mercury one (a static exhibit) I would have had more artefacts and/or interactive exhibits surrounding the display.
- The display of the shuttle was gorgeous. Many of the interactive exhibits there were top notch. For example, as you look at Atlantis, they have large touch screen stations where you can browse past shuttle missions. You can sort them to look at, for example, only Atlantis's missions (and only those that dealt with, say, science or milestones or whatever).
- It's hard to go wrong with a rocket park, and it's nice to finally finally finally see a Titan II.
- The way they had screens hide/reveal artefacts at particular points in a narration was interesting. I like that technology. I wonder if it could be used in other ways?
- They had a lot of high-impact stuff. The Vehicle Assembly Building. Atlantis. A Saturn V, 1B, Gemini Titan, Juno II, Jupiter C, Mercury Atlas, Mercury Redstone, etc, etc. A full sized model of Hubble. Spacesuit prototypes. Spacesuits (used). Apollo 14, GT-9A, one of the mercury rockets handpicked by Von Braun for a Mercury mission that never was (due to Deke Slayton's heart condition). Big, big things, all shiny, all incredibly impressive.
The Not-So-Good
- Every time you enter a building, they ****ing force you through 10-15 minutes of some kind of movie. It's all over-the-top Americana propaganda. Yaaawn. Please, please, for the love of god, make it so that there's an option to skip that stuff. I honestly think I have a headache (still!!) from the volume and the glaring lights and just... no. Please. No. On the one hand, you're forcing information down the throats of people who might not be inclined to read signage or who might not know some pretty cool stories (Neil Armstrong straightening out the spin of GT-6 is a good story and the 3D effects were solid)... on the other hand, it gets old SO quickly. So, SO quickly.
- They never explicitly lied, but they also didn't always tell the truth. In doing so, they left out some really neat stories. For example: Gemini 9A. Nobody knows about poor Gemini, really, so I may well have been the only person to have caught this but they framed it like GT-9A was the first American spacewalk. It wasn't. GT-4 was. As in, five Gemini capsules earlier. Was there a spacewalk? Yes. Was it kind of cool? well, yeah, but not cool enough that I read THAT transcript. I did a project on Gemini. I have read transcripts for GT-3 (entirety, it was only about three hours) the parts of GT-4 where stuff happened, GT-6 where Neil did his thing, and fragments of others. Additionally, there was a lot of focus on trying to include people -- the Space Shuttle "how it might have been designed" video made a point to include a woman, a white guy, a black guy, and an asian guy. They mention the Calculators at various points (largely women of color). There's a brilliant and missed opportunity to mention the Mercury 13, but they just don't. They could have put a single kiosk about them and bam, you're telling their story and it's a pretty neat story that could inspire women.
- The Saturn V hall. I'm sorry, Huntsville does it better. Period! It tells a cohesive story from Able and Baker through the Falcon 9. Now, KSC is much bigger than the USSRC, so I don't fault them for not having as tight a narrative. I fault them for not having any narrative. Their signage was... not horrible but not great. Their aesthetic was pretty dang cool. They had some good stuff, and it's hard to really beat a Saturn V, period. But you have to do something. Otherwise, it just ain't that interesting. I like and respect their assorted In Memoriam exhibits for Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia, but the rest of the hall needed a little integration.
- Okay, there wasn't a narrative through most of the museum. The shuttle hall was great, really great, high impact... but no narrative. Sure, it's a shuttle, it's impressive, it has to be. But what did Atlantis DO? I don't want to have to piece it together, I want to be able to see it, touch it, Atlantis is right THERE, darnit! It has the "Astronaut's Attic" syndrome so very common to space museums, the kind of thing that doesn't need to happen. Like, guys. Come on. You like telling yarns, I've heard you! It's the best part about the space program, all the crazy stories! Let's tell a bloody story. Go for the low hanging fruit: You have ATLANTIS. The one who SAVED HUBBLE. Hubble has so many pretty pictures, you have a Hubble, you have the technology to show off those pretty pictures until we feel faintly dizzy from the starfields, hubble has made an enormous impact, let's DO this thing!
- Not all of their stuff was as well labelled as I would have liked. Okay, you have a giant hubble. Okay, it isn't a real hubble. But, um, why? Why do you have a hubble, exactly? Was it used for training? Is it just for funsies? Why is it here? I know why Atlantis was here, that's cool and all, but... like... guys...this is like that lunar lander model all over again.
- There were very few interactive exhibits that didn't involve technology. I know interactives have to be robust and KSC has more issues (aka guests) than most, but what about a good, sturdy, wooden-panel-with-a-hinge? Something solid and hard to destroy. Or a wheel. It's hard to destroy a sufficiently robust wheel. Technology breaks a lot (or simply isn't responsive and is therefore frustrating). Some nice, heavy-duty signage (make it in english and spanish, or if you want, make it in multiple languages with relatively minimal text/pictures) would have been welcome.
The "What do I do with this information?"
- Eileen Collins, first female shuttle commander, was a math major. Also an air force colonel. I didn't know that and thought it was really interesting to think about.
- I'm not begrudging the local history section, I'm just not sure why it was there exactly.
- We never did find a map.
- I don't know where they found their soundtrack. Bargain bin Jurassic Park? Bombastic Americana (101 greatest hits)? It wasn't bad, sure made the day feel epic... but wow. That's a genre.
- Cool architecture on the Hall of Heroes in particular. Okay, cool architecture all around. Did it add much? IDK. Did it subtract much? IDK.
- They almost didn't mention the german rocket team at all. I guess that's more Huntsville's schtick, but they mention Von B a few times like they expect you to know who he is?
- Actually, they seemed to expect an awful lot of background information from their guests. Meh.
- They had a lot of personal astronaut artefacts. I'm not quite sure why? They were cool, but I don't think I really "got" the full significance? Maybe they're more to help ground older/nostalgic guests or to add some kind of atmosphere?
All in all, a fun day... but when I see a museum like this, I sort of start to twitch. And don't get me STARTED on the Dinosaur Store/Museum! Give me some time to rearrange that one and talk to Jack, the guy who knows So Much About Dinosaurs and they could have something even more spectacular! 😱
