When most people think of a National Historic Landmark, the first images which come to mind tend to run towards museums, forlorn field trips, and wretched, endless family trips in the back of a Vega. But these days (and, for some of us, this is a horrifying statement of age) NASA sites are finding themselves on the list of history’s greatest hits.
The rooms containing Mission Control in Houston during the earliest days of the space race, for example, have received National Historic Landmark designation. And as the History Channel’s Apollo: The Race Against Time (DISH Network 120) reveals, the same care is going into preserving the spacesuits worn by original Moonwalkers Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.
Although an unused Saturn V rocket—the enormous monster of a booster which sent astronauts to the Moon—sat exposed to Florida’s coastal sea air for decades at the Kennedy Space Center, the complex restored it and housed the rocket in a gorgeous air-conditioned hanger. Johnson Space Center in Houston, where a Saturn V was similarly left to the humid elements (“like an enormous beached whale,” in the words of one astronaut), followed suit in 2006.
But not all of NASA’s history is so scrupulously safeguarded. Although the Kennedy Space Center’s Saturn V is safe, the gantry which supported it is not. When the Apollo program was cut and the launch site turned to the Shuttle, the top halves of the gantries at the two launch pads were lopped off. The top swing arm from the gantry—the one which provided access to the spacecraft itself—was taken to KSC’s Visitor Complex to provide visitors with the opportunity to walk in the footprints of Armstrong and Aldrin. The rest? Sits in a heap behind KSC’s headquarters building.
Lots of good work highlighted on this program. Lots of good work still to do.
