Hutchinson, Kansas usually doesn't make anyone's list of cities with an influential space presence. Jeff Ollenburger wants to change that.
"We are planning to become the most comprehensive space museum in the world," Ollenburger, marketing coordinator for the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center, said in a recent interview. "That's our goal."
While the Cosmosphere lacks the publicity of the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum or NASA centers in Houston or Florida, it makes up for it with an impressive display of space artifacts that will soon be bolstered by a multi-million dollar expansion project which will triple the amount of display space available. By the end of the this year, when the expansion project is completed, only the Air and Space Museum will have a larger collection of space artifacts than the Cosmosphere.
The Cosmosphere, which attracted over 300,000 visitors from the U.S. and 60 other countries last year, combines its collection of American and Soviet space artifacts with an ambitious educational program that include a SpaceCamp-like summer program, the only OMNIMAX theater in the state, and the Justice Planetarium, the newest and largest planetarium in Kansas. Put together, they make the Cosmosphere the best space museum in the Midwest, and among the best in the country.
Hutchinson: Salt to Stars
Hutchinson's history has been oriented not at the stars, but into the earth. The city of 40,000 on the central Kansas prairie grew largely on the success of salt mining operations in the area, which provided a major source of salt for the country. Companies now use the old salt mines as facilities for long-term, stable storage of records and other materials.
Ironically, it was because of Hutchinson's success with mining the Earth that it could turn its attention to the stars. In 1962, Patricia Carey of the Carey Salt Company helped create the Hutchinson Planetarium. Carey had been interested in planetary and space science and, sparked by the Space Race, helped create the facility on the Kansas State Fairgrounds in Hutchinson.
The initial success of the planetarium prompted a move into more spacious facilities at Hutchinson Community College in 1966. In 1980, after four years of effort by Carey and space curator Max Ary, the rechristened Kansas Cosmosphere and Discovery Center moved into its present facility adjacent to the college. The Cosmosphere changed its name to the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center in 1990 to emphasize its focus on space.
The Cosmosphere in the Present
A visitor to the Cosmosphere first sees one of the centerpieces of the museum's collection: a full-scale mockup of the lunar lander. The mockup was built by Grumman and originally used by NBC during its coverage of the lunar landings as a way of showing to a viewing public unfamiliar with the spacecraft how it worked. A mockup of a lunar rover usually displayed with the lander is currently on loan to the Smithsonian, which is using it in its traveling exhibit for its 150th anniversary.
The rover will also be used in a commercial sponsored by the Discover credit card company to promote the Smithsonian's anniversary, according to Ollenburger. Bill Nye, of the PBS children's science show "Bill Nye the Science Guy", will sit in the rover and talk about the Smithsonian in the commercial.
This Cosmosphere offers the largest display of space suits of any museum in the world. Many of the suits on display are rare prototype versions of proposed moonwalk suits that were not used by NASA. A suit worn by Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins while training for his historic mission is also on display. One suit on display that was used was that of Svetlana Savitskaya, the first woman to walk in space. The suit was given to the museum in 1989 and is, according to Ollenburger, the "first space suit given to the Western world from Russia."
The museum also has a number of spacecraft and spacecraft mockups. Included are both Soviet spacecraft, such as an engineering model of the Lunakhod robotic lunar rover, and American spacecraft, including Mercury and Gemini capsules and an engineering model of the Apollo spacecraft from the Apollo-Soyuz mission.
Ollenburger is particularly proud of their Mercury capsule, which would have been flown on the next Mercury mission had the program not ended after Mercury 9. "This was our first restoration piece," he said. "When we got this it was just in pieces. It was scattered all over, it had been outside, it had rainwater in it."
The success of the "Mercury 10" restoration and other efforts led the Cosmosphere to spin off a for-profit company, Space Works, in 1988. "We are the only permanent space artifact restorer and creator," Ollenburger said. Space Works gained prominence last year with its work for the movie Apollo 13. The company constructed about 80 percent of the space artifacts seen in the movie, and will soon work on restoring the original Apollo 13 capsule.
The museum also focuses on other space artifacts. "We like to think that we not only have the major artifacts, but a lot of the support pieces that go along with it," Ollenburger said. The artifacts include part of the heat shield from Apollo 17, a checklist from Apollo 8, and one of the main drag chutes from the Apollo 11 capsule.
In addition to a moon rock from Apollo 11, the museum has on display the scoop from Surveyor 3, the man-made object that has spent the most time on the lunar surface and been returned to Earth. The scoop was retrieved by Apollo 12 after 31 months on the surface. "We had the hardest time getting this piece: NASA thought it was destroyed as they studied it, Ollenburger said. "We finally had it in front of their face and showed them it existed."
Besides its extensive exhibits, the Cosmosphere has a strong space education program. The key aspect of their space program is a Space Camp-like activity called the Future Astronaut Training Program. The five-day summer camp, held weekly throughout the summer, is designed for students in grades seven through nine. Two levels provide varying levels of difficulty for the nearly 500 campers each summer.
The camp features the usual assortment of activities, including a centrifuge, a three-axis simulator, and a MMU (manned maneuvering unit) simulator, as well as mockups of the cockpit of the space shuttle and mission control. The weeklong training includes a mission, in which all the campers participate.
The Cosmosphere's version of space camp does has its differences with the more well-known versions in Alabama and Florida. "Everyone gets to do everything," Ollenburger said. "In Huntsville you're assigned to one position and that's where you are. Here everyone gets to fly a mission, ride in the simulator, and so on."
The Cosmosphere also conducts other educational programs, including space science workshops and a regional teacher resource center. About 40,000 to 50,000 students visit the Cosmosphere reach year on field trips.
The Cosmosphere in the Future
A nearly-completed $13 million expansion will enable the Cosmosphere to expand its exhibit area and better display its offerings. The expansion, funded by corporate donations and a local sales tax, will expand the total floor space to over 100,000 square feet and triple the amount of exhibit space currently available. "It will finally allow us to show everything that we have," Ollenburger said.
Ollenburger gave SpaceViews a sneak preview of the new Cosmosphere. The new museum will move its entrance around to the other side of the building, where a new lobby is being constructed. There, instead of seeing a full-scale lunar module, visitors will see something even more dramatic: a SR-71 Blackbird and a full-scale shuttle mockup.
The SR-71 will be one of only 12 on display in the country. The plane will be displayed in the air at an angle to give it the illusion of flight. The shuttle mockup will be a full-scale version, but only half of it will be built: the mockup will be mounted into a wall so that the right half of the shuttle is seen. The wing of the shuttle will serve an additional purpose as a stage for presentations held in the lobby, which can hold several hundred people.
The exhibits area will include a new section on German rocketry. The centerpieces of this area will be an authentic, restored, V-1 buzz-bomb and V-2 rocket built by Nazi Germany during World War II. "A lot of people really shudder at this, but they were really strong innovators of modern rocketry," Ollenburger explained.
The V-2 is one of only four to six in the country. Cosmosphere staff found the rocket "in pretty bad shape" in Alabama and pieced it back together. "We almost had to entirely rebuild the outside, but the all the parts inside are original," said Ollenburger.
The German rocketry display, in a motif of a forced labor camp where the rockets were built, will have the theme of "The Oppressed, the Oppressor, and the Dreamer." The oppressed, Ollenburger explained, would be the prison laborers who built the rockets; the oppressors would be the Nazis, and the dreamer will be Von Braun. "He will be at the tail end [of the exhibit by himself, and the doors will be cracked. The moon will be up in the crack, and he will be looking through the crack, wondering how this will get him there."
The German rocketry exhibit will lead to an even more ambitious exhibit about the Space Race. A large exhibit area will be divided in half by 10-15 feet of the original Berlin Wall. According to Ollenburger, "We will have a status of Khrushchev on one side and a status of Kennedy on the other." American and Soviet spacecraft exhibits, including the Apollo 13 command module, will be placed on appropriate sides of the wall, with a full-scale mockup of Apollo-Soyuz at the far end of the exhibit hall.
"When we are done with our museum will be the only museum to have spacecraft, either flown or replicated, from each [manned] program in American and Russian history," said Ollenburger.
In addition to spacecraft on the American side, there will be exhibits of rockets engines from the Mercury Redstone and Titan II. However, there will be more than meets the eye. "As you walk closer, though, you'll notice the full Gemini Titan, going 106 feet in the air, is there, as will be the Mercury Redstone," Ollenburger said. The rockets will be mounted vertically in an enclosure on the side of the museum, near the lobby entrance.
The museum is trying to add the Apollo 1 spacecraft to its stable of vehicles. "On several occasions NASA has tried to destroy the spacecraft and we have often been the sole roadblock in their efforts," Ollenburger said. The museum has just finished a proposal to bring the Apollo 1 capsule to Kansas to be restored and placed in display.
The museum is also the only organization trying to retrieve Liberty Bell 7, Gus Grissom's Mercury capsule which sunk after splashing down in the Atlantic. Two attempts have been made to retrieve the capsule, which is lying in 15,000 feet of water. According to Ollenburger, the most recent attempt failed when the cable broke trying to bring the capsule up.
The expansion also includes educational programs. In 1997 the Cosmosphere will start a space science magnet school in coordination with high schools in Hutchinson and elsewhere in Reno County. Students will learn about space science, planetary science, and rocketry in both classroom and hands-on surroundings.
Ollenburger is proud of the current status of the museum, but looks forward to its bright future. "We have always been a top-notch facility but as we grow hopefully we'll become more of a destination like some of the other space museums have become."
[Editor's Note: From Moon Miners' Manifesto, Issue #91]
The first industrial equipment to make landfall on the moon will not be a small pilot demonstration plant to make the first exportable product (oxygen from moon rock, being the popular candidate). Rather it will be equipment needed to set up the lunar outpost properly in the first place. This means equipment to make sintered regolith blocks to use in directly- or indirectly-applied shielding, and possibly solar concentrators and molds to make cast basalt products such as paving blocks for dust control.
Any kind of construction and/or industrial activity will require soil handling equipment. IF this equipment is properly engineered, it can, at the same time, providentially separate out iron-rich materials (by passing over the soil being handled with a magnet) and solar-wind-derived gasses and other volatiles adsorbed to the fine soil particles - such as hydrogen, helium, neon, argon, xenon, carbon, and nitrogen (by heating). This process we have dubbed "primage." Every scoopful of regolith we move with cheaper equipment not so designed represents a lost opportunity to set ourselves up for subsequent industrial activity, in a sort of sinful shortsightedness on a par with our current policy of throwing away the space shuttle external tank.
Mark these words: if, through political shortsightedness in a government effort, or through misguided accounting decisions or scheduling impatience in a commercial effort, the first soil moving equipment on the moon is not "equipped to primage," we will have set ourselves in an ever self-deepening rut to nowhere. Impatience always backfires - it's a cosmic law.
If we are providential enough to so set ourselves up, among the first products of hit-the-ground running industries will be bins or bowls, and tankage, in which to keep separate such industrially handy scavenged materials. We may also want to harvest and "embin" the less common differently enriched regolith soils wherever we find them relatively unmixed. These will include (in addition to the common aluminum and calcium enriched highland soils and the iron and titanium enriched mare soils - both handy to a "coastal" site) the so-called KREEP soils from the Mare Imbrium impact splashout enriched in potassium, rare earth elements, and phosphorus; iron-enriched orange soils like that found at Shorty crater; iron and titanium enriched ilmenite soils; material from large crater central peaks, probably representing upthrusts of deep mantle material; and the glassy spherules found everywhere.
Initial "Industrial" Equipment
We'll want a bulldozer/grader fully equipped to primage, a solar concentrator able to produce various levels of heat, various handy molds, some of them refractory (able to withstand high heat), and sieving and compacting devices. We'll also want a lab capable of testing performance characteristics, and a shop with in which we can "work" these initial crude materials, and "fabricate" them into useful items: building blocks and bricks, paving slabs, bins and other containers, tankage, additional molds, support "tables" for additional imported equipment, etc. As soon as feasible, we will want equipment that will let us tinker with sintered and cast iron and crude glass products.
Yes, we want to set out a ready-to-go-just plug-in oxygen extraction pilot/demonstration module. But if we come truly committed from the outset to a permanent industrial presence, then the oxygen trick, taken alone, buys us little. Oxygen is important enough to share top priority status. Delivered back to LEO for refueling moon-bound ferries, it will lower the cost of importing additional equipment to the moon. But every needed piece of low performance equipment that can be made on the moon in a simple starter industry also cuts down import costs, even more directly, by cutting down appreciably the total accumulative weight of equipment needing to be imported. We need this two-pronged approach. To scorn it, as unworthy of attention, would be, to put it honestly, just plain fatally stupid.
Beyond that, we must always keep in mind, that anything the outpost can make for itself, however crude - as long as it is serviceable, is a potential export to other space locations at a decided cost-advantage over unnecessarily refined alternatives made within, and shipped out of Earth's deep gravity well. This should be the guiding philosophy of lunar industrial diversification aimed at a healthy diversified export trade.
A companion stratagem that will "set us up" better yet is to especially fabricate all equipment that does, and must initially, come up from Earth so that those components which can eventually be replaced by serviceable moon-made parts are made of elements not easily or economically produced on the moon, at least not in the near future, but which will be essential for a healthy diversified industrial operation. For example, tables, tanks, bins, dividers, separators, containers and other packaging materials, etc. should be made of strategic cannibalizable materials such as copper, brass, stainless steel, aluminum alloy, easily reusable simple polymers like polyethylene and polyurethane, etc.
While such "special" manufacturing specifications may make the import item initially more expensive in itself, and perhaps even heavier and therefore more fuel-costly to import, the subsequent advantage to infant lunar industry may very well outweigh these upfront penalties. If we are indeed in this for the long haul, then long term goals must be given priority over short-term budgeting myopia.
To insure that this is the plan we will indeed follow, it is absolutely essential that we first sell ourselves, then others whose support we will need, on the whole "ladder" of a lunar industrial settlement, and not just one innocuous unalarming "rung" at a time. The rung-by-rung sales pitch now in vogue among space-activists is perhaps the single most responsible fatal flaw behind our current going-nowhere space efforts.
PHOTO CREDITS: top story: J. Foust bottom story: NASA
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