Spacecraft Replicas Options

[JRehling]

I just wanted to share a moment from last month that is on topic for this board, though quite different from the usual discussion.

At the NASA Ames Visitor Center, there is a non-flown replica of the Pioneer Venus Orbiter. I've seen many test/training/duplicate spacecraft in the past, but it was a fresh and powerful experience to walk around this, possibly because it was at eye/body level instead of suspended in the rafters. I was immediately struck by the size of the thing – much bigger than I intuitively would have guessed – and how comparatively minor and hidden the instruments and their portals were. Just to throw out numbers to describe this, the spacecraft bus was a cylinder 2.5 m in diameter and the instruments weighed 45 kg out of a 517 kg dry mass for the spacecraft.

But the real point of this post is to relate the power of being next to the replica rather than reading numbers or looking at a small image on a computer monitor, what the philosopher Heidegger called Dasein, or "being there." I'm sure with other spacecraft, the reaction would be a bit of surprise at how small it is, or how prominent the instruments, or how powerfully built or how spindly. But when you spend hours per month (per day?) thinking about spacecraft, it can be quite an eye-opener to see one, and particularly when one is quite close to the thing, an experience I don't recall from, say, the National Air and Space Museum where, in my memory, many of them are presented, but farther away.

Another quite marvelous experience I had, when I worked at NASA Ames, was taking my copy of "The Right Stuff" and perching by a training model Mercury capsule and reading the passages about the flight of Shephard (or Glenn?) and finding the instruments, levers, buttons, and knobs described in the text in the real spacecraft (a plate of plexiglass allowed one to see, but not touch, them). It was the ultimate visual aid for the text, one that I was lucky to have closely accessible.

This is a suggestion that everyone interested in them should take an opportunity when convenient to see them. And if anyone ever has the opportunity to present one to visitors, I have to remark again how much better the experience of seeing one quite closely – within a meter, and at eye level – rather than hung up in the rafters. Part of this business is to capture the imagination of the public, and it's not just the planets and their moons that are marvelous, but also the craft that go there to explore them for us.