There… and back.

And a couple of guests way too young to understand what this is, and their Dad, not that much older, looking at a model and asking if I remember any of this. (Gee, thanks. I’m not THAT old. Except, wait, yeah, I AM. Oh, crap. When did THIS happen?)

We went into the training module.

“Yep. It’s primitive, it’s old school stuff. Stone knives and bearskins. You guys are all about going to Mars, but this is where that Mars trip started. Back in the day (yeah, I know…) the guys who floated around in these little tin cans, man, they were IT. When Apollo 11 launched, anyone who had a TV or KNEW anyone who had a TV was parked in front of it. And we were watching the moon shot, because there was nothing else on. If you’d wanted to watch something else, which you wouldn’t have because this was THE biggest story EVER, you couldn’t. EVERY station showed the moon launch.

“And then after Apollo, there was Skylab…. kind of an afterthought even to NASA, thrown together and launched with spare parts and scrap, mostly. We had the stuff, and there weren’t any more moon trips planned, so they turned some of the surplus into a space station. It wasn’t nearly a big deal except to the geeks, because we understood that it was potentially even more important.

“Because the trip to anywhere else….

“That thing at the bottom is a pressure chamber the astronauts used to keep the blood circulating properly in their legs. Turns out they didn’t need that, but we didn’t know then. Above that is an exercise bicycle, and the guy above that is taking a shower.

“Yup. They had a shower. They were up there for weeks at a time and they had to get clean. The toilet’s on the other side, just up there. The bedroom is below that. That guy up there, above the shower? He’s eating lunch. Or dinner. Or something.

“That’s the wardroom, I guess they’d call it. It’s where they’d eat and hang out and do paperwork.

The observatory is through that hatch, up there in the middle.

“And see those boxes around the hull? Those were storage, but they also were a track that the astronauts could use for exercise… those are water tanks beside them. Water’s heavy, so it was spread out around the circumference of the station.

“See, this big metal can here, this was where we started learning how to live up there. And it mattered, even if it wasn’t a big PR thing, because getting off the planet, getting up to the stars, meant we’d have to be able to live up there outside the gravity wells, where we could actually build big ships and launch at zero-g. When I was in school, your age, we used to argue about whether Roddenberry’s Enterprise could actually land on a planet, or if gravity would tear it apart. And Skylab, this was the first part of learning that, you see? They did a lot of science, too – solar observation, star charts, weather, that stuff… but learning how to live up there was what mattered.

“The moon rocks were the glamour, the gee whiz, the “holy shit we’re THERE” stuff… but living in a space station… that was the future. We had to learn how somewhere, and this was the somewhere.”

I’m not sure they got it.

They will, someday.