The fabulous ruins of NASA
March 4, 2016 9:41 AM   Subscribe

Remnants of the American space race, photographed from Florida to California. "There is a spiritual quality to Launch Complex 34. The launch pedestal with its large round opening to the sky gives it the look of some ancient astronomical archaeological ruin, something like Stonehenge."
From a new book.
posted by doctornemo (19 comments total) 40 users marked this as a favorite
 
These are wonderful! I especially love this one, which looks fake, like something you'd see in a bad science fiction movie broadcast on UHF at 2:00 in the afternoon one day in the 1970s.

This one as well, which seems so amazingly primitive, but was state-of-the-art within my lifetime.
posted by bondcliff at 9:52 AM on March 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


What was the rubber room used for?
posted by Keith Talent at 10:02 AM on March 4, 2016


I want the chairs from that ICBM silo
posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 10:06 AM on March 4, 2016 [2 favorites]


What was the rubber room used for?

Rubber room on wikipedia.

Gizmodo: Inside NASA’s Mysterious Rubber Room
posted by peeedro at 10:10 AM on March 4, 2016 [2 favorites]


From the Wikipedia link: "Rubber room is the nickname given to the emergency egress bunkers located 40 feet (12 m) beneath the launch pads at Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39; there is one below each of the two pads. The bunkers were built in the 1960s for the Apollo program, and were intended to provide a safe refuge for personnel on the launch pad in the event of an imminent explosion of the rocket."
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 10:14 AM on March 4, 2016


Aren't those Cyrillic letters on the gauges/dials in the Pressure Gauge Panel picture ?
posted by k5.user at 10:21 AM on March 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


Higher resolution of the Pressure Gauge Panel, and an article about the same book with one or two more photos.
posted by phlyingpenguin at 10:28 AM on March 4, 2016


That plug board blows my mind.

But I'd love to make a cocktail lounge out of that Titan II launch control room, which looks just like a set from a groovy Japanese science fiction movie.
posted by Gelatin at 10:29 AM on March 4, 2016 [3 favorites]


Great picture collection. I had been thinking about putting together some images of decaying businesses around the KSC area with Shuttle-inspired themes, since they're slowly taking them down. There used to be a McDonald's playground with a Space Shuttle kids could climb around in, for example. And "The Space Station" club is gone, where I liked to joke that it smelled like a locker room and there were just a few bored Russians inside.

Also, at least one of the components in the gallery has been recently reanimated.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 10:29 AM on March 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


I really have to wonder what Wikipedia meant when they wrote that "several species of wildlife" took up residence in the rubber room. My imagination says alligators. Albino NASA alligators.
posted by happyroach at 10:42 AM on March 4, 2016


Compare the groovy old school launch room to Space X's modern version.
posted by Existential Dread at 10:49 AM on March 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


I took a tour of KSC a couple months ago. At one point, we stopped at the telescope tracking station. There's a weird pile of rotting sandbags about 6 feet tall in one corner of the area, so I asked the tour guide about it. Apparently, in the very first flights from KSC, the tracking telescope was powered by a small generator; the sandbags were to protect the generator from shock waves from the rocket. Of course by the mid-60s they had power throughout the site and the generator was unnecessary, but the sandbags had just been sitting there rotting for 50+ years.
posted by miyabo at 11:06 AM on March 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


Bondcliff and Gelatin - I thought the control room looked like the laboratory/control room set in EPCOT's Spaceship Earth.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:15 PM on March 4, 2016


There's something Terry Gilliam-ish about the Saturn Engine Clusters. Really a beautiful photo set.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 12:39 PM on March 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck
, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."


(This is beautiful. And sad.)
posted by RedOrGreen at 12:53 PM on March 4, 2016 [4 favorites]


I put the Cyrillic script on the pressure gauge panel (И ВЕИИКИЕ ТАКЖЕ) through Google Translate as Russian and got something to the effect of "also great".

Not sure if first character of 'И ВЕИИКИЕ' is supposed to be 'И' as it is rendered as 'N' in the image; also not sure if last character of same sequence is 'Е' or 'В', but the former returns meaningful results via Google Translate whilst the latter does not.

Anyone know the story here or able to shed some light on the language / meaning?
posted by Outside Context Problem at 4:18 PM on March 4, 2016


Compare the groovy old school launch room to Space X's modern version.

I bet there's not a single cigarette lighter on any of those consoles.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 6:50 PM on March 4, 2016


RobotVoodooPower: "Compare the groovy old school launch room to Space X's modern version.

I bet there's not a single cigarette lighter on any of those consoles.
"

And ashtray! Reminds me that I used to smoke cigarettes on commercial airline flights.

One of the DVDs I have about the Apollo program actually includes a warning at the beginning that cigarette smoking will be shown in the footage. How times change!

(Excellent find, BTW! I would never have spotted that.)
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 6:59 PM on March 4, 2016


Compare the groovy old school launch room to Space X's modern version.

That's kind of apples and oranges. This is the old-school analog of the modern space facility. The modern equivalent of the missile launch system still holds the "hit it with a wrench" killing machine design ethos.

What struck me about the "modern" version is how there were still only four women in the room. By 2066, gosh, they could make up a whole QUARTER of the workforce!
posted by Ogre Lawless at 2:00 PM on March 8, 2016


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