It's my last night in Houston. When I arrived here, a week ago today, the first thing I did was put a country music station on the radio. I don't often listen to country, but I thought while in Texas it would be appropriate. As I drove to and from my various meetings and site visits, I became familiar with the country hits. All of them. The songs were new to me a week ago, but now it's been two or three days since I've heard a single song that I didn't recognize. I guess my trip to Houston is reaching a fundamental limit and it's nearly time to go home.

I've spent the bulk of the last couple of days on the campus of Rice University and in the rooftop suite of the nearby Warwick Hotel. Each of the last three days I attended two lectures in the morning and two lectures in the afternoon. The presenters were leading researchers from institutions all over America who had flown in to brief the National Science Writers meeting which I was attending. Amazing that they could get such high-powered speakers for our little group of perhaps forty journalists. For instance yesterday, after his presentation, I sat at a table for lunch with a Nobel Prize winner! He won the prize in 1996 for his work in discovering the third elemental state of carbon, C60, also known as the 'Buckyball'. Other lectures covered work in molecular nanocomputers, genetic vaccinations, and higher dimensional theories of Gravity.

Today, I went back to the Johnson Space Center for their big Open House. It was another religious experience for me. I started at Ellington Field, where NASA keeps a fleet of T-38 jet fighters for the astronauts to fly. They use them to keep up their flying proficiency and as personal transportation to meetings and training sessions around the country. Ellington Field is also home of the infamous Vomit Comet, the KC-135 zero G training aircraft. It was used to film many of the weightless scenes in 'Apollo 13'. The odd looking Super Guppy airplane, used to ferry Saturn V parts in the days of old and ISS parts today, and the 747 NASA uses to move the Shuttle Orbiters were there too.

Next, I progressed on the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, an enormous swimming pool with a full scale mock up of the Space Station exterior and the Shuttle payload bay submerged within it. The astronauts use this facility to practice space walks. While I was there, two astronauts were just finishing a training session. I watched as they hauled them out of the water, still in their full space suits, with a crane. It was really neat seeing their faces moving around inside the big helmets. There were perhaps a dozen SCUBA divers helping them in the water, and even more technicians on deck to assist them out of their suits when they had been lifted clear of the water. It seemed disproportional to see the brobdignaggian scale of the facility and the number of highly skilled people assembled there just to train two rather ordinary looking guys (apart from the fact they were wearing NASA space suits, which isn't ordinary at all, of course.) But then, isn't everything NASA does on a scale that is larger than life?

The most profound moment of the day came when I walked up the stairs of Building 30, a large, windowless, five floor building, which houses Mission Control. At the top of three flights of stairs, I walked down a drab, sixties-ish looking, federal style corridor, and into the original Mission Operations Control Room. Although the public doesn't often enter the room, it has been designated a National Historic Landmark and has been fully restored to it's Apollo era configuration. A few Shuttle flights had been controlled from it, but none since 1994. The Shuttle is now controlled from a new room in a new wing of the building. Upon seeing the Apollo control room, empty and quiet, but with its rows of familiar consoles still in place, I felt a chill of awe. This was no simulator or museum piece - this was the real deal.

I walked over to the EECOM console and ran my hands over the panel. I think it is when we actually touch something that it becomes truly real to us. This console is really where an electrical engineer named Sy Liebergott was sitting in April of 1970 the moment Apollo 13 exploded. He was the controller most responsible for diagnosing the problem as it happened. Next, I moved over to the CAPCOM console where the astronauts who spoke to the flight crew in space, relaying all of Mission Control's instructions worked. Astronaut Charlie Duke was sitting at this very console when Neil Armstrong said to him "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." Charlie answered with "Roger" in typical astronaut fashion. Then I hopped up one row to the Flight Director's console and reverently sat down. From this chair, men like Gene Kranz, Glyn Lunney, Cliff Charlesworth, and Milt Windler orchestrated the Apollo missions like a conductor presides over a symphony. I felt a lump in my throat when I thought about the long, stress filled nights that had been spent in this room. Then, an involuntary grin broke out on my face thinking about the film I've seen of the cheering and celebration in this very room right after the Eagle touched down safely on the surface of the Moon for the first time.

I sat at the Flight Director's console for many minutes, conjuring up images in my head of all the amazing things that had happened right where I was sitting. I've got a good imagination and I played out many incredible scenes in my mind that had really happened there. There is no place in the Universe more essentially connected to the monumental achievement of Apollo than this very room, I thought, save the six landing sites on the Moon itself. I left the facility, in a stupor of awe, by way of the same staircase Ken Mattingly ran up to Mission Control at the last possible minute with the checklist for the Apollo 13 reentry. It didn't even occur to me at the time, but it's true. I wonder what stories the water fountain I sipped from in the corridor just outside the control room could have told?

I'm leaving Hogwart's for the muggle world tomorrow. I'll be flying home around 12:30 p.m., Houston time, and arriving in Monterey around 8:00 p.m. California time. Brent is going to meet me at the airport. He hasn't been able to do that my last several trips because of his work schedule. This time, I'm planning on giving him a big kiss right there. I've never kissed him in so public a place before, but I'm feeling very daring about it! I hope I don't chicken out at the last minute. If you all want to follow my flight across the southwest, use this link for a geographic display of where my airplane is. All you need is my flight numbers, which I shall provide. The link is: Flight Tracker. Here's my flight data:

Date	Flight	Dept	City	Arv	City
3 Nov 00	DL 4294	1235	HOU	1352	DFW
3 Nov 00	DL 2137	1540	DFW	1651	LAX
3 Nov 00	UA 7912	1835	LAX	1955	MRY