![]() ![]() The weather during that grand opening was rainy and chilly but the crowd was enthusiastic and included astronauts like Thomas Stafford, who commanded the Apollo 10 moon mission, and Charles Bolden, who would later serve as President Barack Obama's NASA administrator. HUM Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images That same year, Space Center Houston opened to the public and let visitors take a backstage tour of the center, seeing astronauts at work. NASA's Mission Control center at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, is shown in 1992. In lieu of a two-hour tram ride through an abandoned backlot area full of discarded sitcom sets, patrons could take a 90-minute tram ride through Johnson Space Center, potentially seeing NASA astronauts undergoing training or work being done inside the actual NASA Mission Control center.Īs eight-year-old Adrian Haggar, who was among the 1,000 people to visit Space Center Houston on its opening day, put it bluntly to the Houston Chronicle, "There's a lot of interesting stuff to do here." Instead of embarking on a slow-moving dark ride that used animatronics to show what life may be like in a "Jetsons"-style space-age future, visitors at Space Center Houston got to sit in a zero-gravity seat and fly simulated missions that were reportedly so tough to pull off that actual astronauts at the grand opening struggled with them. Rather than staged Hollywood-style preshow videos loaded with celebrity cameos, guests would first see a fast-paced documentary that took them through every NASA mission to that point, completely free of narration, including the heartbreaking results of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger mission. At its launch, the new visitors center for NASA's Johnson Space Center served as a science museum and space exploration education center. In short, this wasn't supposed to be EPCOT Texas.Ī crowd attends opening-day ceremonies at Space Center Houston on Oct. It was billed more as an interactive museum than a theme park. ![]() Instead, Space Center Houston was a serious place to learn about the history and future of American space travel, with plenty of fun built around the lessons. So there's little wonder why Walt Disney Imagineering was hired to create the early concepts for Space Center Houston and why so many early reports about the facility describe it as "Disney-designed," despite there being little resemblance to any of Mickey Mouse's homes in the final product. The company saw record profits in 1992, led by stellar attendance at its growing list of tourist destinations. ![]() Carlos Antonio Rios/Houston Chronicleĭisney, on the other hand, was lighting fires in the minds of children-and in the wallets of adults-on a daily basis, especially at its theme parks. Construction work at Space Center Houston, Nov. Mike Andrews lamented this turn away from cosmic exploration, explaining to the Houston Chronicle in 1992 that "Congress in the last four years has cut the president's space budget by over $3 billion," which effectively "killed the space station" at the time.īlasting rockets into the stratosphere had somehow become trivial. By the early 1990s, the American space program had lost much of its powerful hold over the public's imagination. When you read the early reports about Space Center Houston, penned in the months leading up to its opening, much of the excitement doesn't seem to come from the site's connections with NASA, but rather with another American icon: Disney. ![]()
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