So this is what NASA’s come to after the shuttle

(For real- from the NASA Orion Twitter account.)

I shouldn’t laugh – the space shuttle Enterprise (whose Earthbound adventures I just happened to be researching last night for a project I’m working on) went on these kind of goodwill tours all the time, including a much-ballyhooed 1979 stop at the airport in Tulsa (why wasn’t I there for that? I shoulda been all over that.) There’s just something sad and incongruous about “y’all c’mon down for low low prices and see the new Command Module!” 😆 I still have much NASA love going on even while we’re in another late-’70s-style doldrums*. And who’s to say this won’t recruit some future astronauts who might otherwise never set eyes on anything that’s headed for space?

* referring to the period between Apollo-Soyuz (1975) and the first shuttle flight (1981) during which there was no American manned presence in space. For a kid who’d just had a lifelong love of space switched on so forcefully (ha!) by Star Wars, this was a painful period.