The big “reveal” of the space shuttle Atlantis, bathed in blue light in its new $100 million exhibit at the Kennedy Space Center, is clearly designed to elicit emotion.
The soaring sound track, bone-jarring bass, and fog machines following not one but two warm-up videos are meant to stir pride in that can-do spirit that made the shuttle program possible.
After a recent showing, when the screen finally rose to reveal Atlantis was actually in the house, even the PR person – who had seen it multiple times – was stricken with a full-on cheek-drenching.
For those whose emotions are embedded in personal memories, having lived along Florida’s east coast, seeing the shuttle in silence might have achieved the same effect.
To get close to the magnificent machine is to somehow get closer to space. The length of three school buses with a 78-foot wing span, the sheer magnitude of the shuttle is awe-inspiring.
The scars of its blistering re-entries, the quilted blankets on its surface, the sterile interior of its cockpit are profoundly affecting as the one special effect – lights rising and dimming as if by the changing position of the sun – alternately illuminates the shuttle’s myriad details, and veils it in indigo mystery.
Exhibit designers had a brilliant stroke when they suspended the 150,000-pound shuttle from the ceiling at a pitched angle as a mockup of the lanky robot arm stretches out like ET over visitors’ heads.
Nearby, a scale model of the Hubble telescope and a vast image of the International Space Station add purpose to Atlantis’s imaginary voyage.
Like the PR person, Andrea Farmer, who grew up in Sanford and Melbourne, it isn’t surprising to have great nostalgia for the space program.
Tens of thousands of Florida children waited for the glorious “We have lift-off!” from the transistor radio or the living room TV, racing outside to search the sky for the tiny yellow ball of light rising on its plume of white.
Few Floridians can recall the 1986 explosion of the shuttle Challenger on lift-off, or the 2003 re-entry that shattered Columbia, without feeling a sense of personal loss.
For thousands along Florida’s east coast, it felt personal when in 2004, then-President George W. Bush announced the shuttle would be formally retired in 2010; the last launch of the Atlantis took place in 2011, after Congress gave it $2.5 billion in 2009, extending the program an extra year.
Considering the 30-year shuttle program cost $200 billion, a $100 million exhibit built around the Atlantis orbiter might not seem extravagant. After all, the effort enshrines an orbiter used in 30 missions by 207 astronauts.
Shrine hardly describes the exhibit itself.
Whereas the other orbiters found homes in museums and space centers, Atlantis’s home, 40 minutes from Orlando, is more theme park than museum – an Angry Birds Space Encounter is just outside the exhibit.
As for educating visitors about the shuttle program, the exhibit is decidedly low-tech.
Small monitors offer former astronauts telling their personal experiences to the queues for the space shuttle simulator, but the sound quality was poor; the few visitors paying attention soon gave up.
Small placards of information surround the shuttle itself, but they too are lost on many as attention is focused upward on the shuttle.
One “interactive” area was supposed to simulate the shuttle’s S-curves on descent and had visitors walking through a few feet of curved pathway and then sliding down a pitched slide – too pitched it turns out; it was closed for tweaking last week.
Other exhibits – the space toilet, the space bed and the space kitchen (the food was missing from its Velcro patches), dotted the lower level, along with a room of kid-friendly simulators for gliding a shuttle onto the runway, and using the robotic arm.
Work on the orbiter Atlantis began in spring of 1980. It flew its first mission five years later with a Department of Defense payload; four other missions also involved DOD.
Another seven involved docking with the Russian Mir space lab, including one mission to bring back American Shannon Lucid after her record-setting six months in space.
The July 2011 flight brought tears to the eyes of many along the Treasure and Space Coasts, who lined the shore from Fort Pierce to Cocoa Beach to watch the final flight of the program.
Anyone in Vero up early that summer morning likely heard – or felt – the sonic booms as Atlantis glided across the peninsula diagonally from Naples.
Turns out, it was coming home for good – the decision of where the orbiters would be displayed had been made three months earlier.
The other shuttles went to New York’s Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum; to Los Angeles’ California Science Center (where trees that lined the shuttle’s path had to be chopped down to make room, much to residents’ dismay); and to Dulles Airport, west of Washington, D.C., where the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum has its Udvar-Hazy Center.
As press stories detailed the economic impact of the end of the shuttle program, the tourism side of the Kennedy Space Center’s was whirring with activity.
The Visitors Complex, run by the Buffalo, NY-based hospitality company Delaware North since 1995, was about to get an infusion of funds; for that company’s reported $30 million investment, Space Florida, the state’s aerospace development agency, backed a bank loan for another $62.5 million.
As the designated host of Atlantis, it brought in the St. Louis-based PGAV Destinations, which, in partnership with NASA set about designing the new attraction.
Along with the new building, it would include a redesigned, reoriented entrance, a striking reflective roof detail emulating the tiles on the orbiter, and replicas of the rocket boosters and the huge orange external propellant tank just outside the exhibit’s doors.
Crews built three walls and a roof before wheeling the shrink-wrapped shuttle over from the Vehicle Assembly Building last November.
Scrambling to close it in and away from the elements with the fourth wall, they then set about hoisting the massive craft to its current position, 36 feet over the main floor.
It took specialists a week to safely open the payload bay doors with their fragile hinges (usually accomplished in zero gravity). They affixed them to the ceiling at critical points with guy wires. Once the bays were opened, they set up the mock robotic arm.
For perspective, designers added a scale replica of the Hubble off to one side, and along the rear of the room, a huge screen displaying an image of the International Space Station, as if the shuttle were on the verge of docking.
The Atlantis exhibit has been added to the existing complex which includes the Apollo/Saturn V Center, an IMAX movie theater with 3-D films on the Hubble space telescope and the shuttle’s involvement in building the Space Station, a food concession and an outdoor “garden” of rockets.