Space exploration doesn’t captivate the public imagination like it once did—and small wonder, considering that the Space Shuttle is limited to endless circles in low-earth orbit, a mere 250 miles up. So now the small group of people who have had the privilege of looking down on Earth are doing something about it. They are going on a barnstorming tour of Washington state to whip up excitement among schoolchildren about seeking discoveries beyond this planet’s atmosphere.

The Association of Space Explorers started its 21st Planetary Congress yesterday at the Sheraton in downtown Seattle, marking only the third time the group has met in the U.S. The group includes 320 astronauts and cosmonauts from 32 countries who have been on missions in space. About 60 of them will tell stories about the wonders of space to an estimated 50,000 children in grades K-12 across the state tomorrow. To give their talks some added oomph, they won’t just talk about the Apollo glory days, but plan to grab the kids’ attention with an issue currently on a lot of minds—global climate change.

“It’s an eye-opening experience to see the parts of the atmosphere of the earth that are about the width of your little finger,” says John Fabian, the co-president of the space exploration group, and an astronaut who flew on the shuttles Challenger and Discovery in the mid-’80s. “It’s fragile, and we need to protect it.”

Fabian, 69, a resident of Port Ludlow, WA, is leading the charge. He’s one of seven Washington residents who have flown in space. The local contingent also includes shuttle astronauts Bonnie Dunbar, president of the Museum of Flight, George (Pinky) Nelson, John O. Creighton, Wendy Lawrence, and Apollo astronauts Bill Anders and Richard Gordon.

I must say they have their work cut out. My most vivid memory of the U.S. space program is the explosion of the Challenger shuttle in 1986, when I was in fifth grade. The No. 2 memory: Columbia’s disintegration over Texas five years ago. NASA’s big successes came before I was born—and well before today’s schoolkids came along—and it shows in public support. One telling statistic: the space program accounted for about 4.4 percent of the federal budget in the peak years of Apollo, a figure that’s dwindled to about 0.5 percent in the current federal budget, Dunbar says.

The public doesn’t appear very motivated to back space exploration. Even during the heat of a presidential election, neither major candidate has had a lot to say about the right future direction for the nation’s space program, Fabian says.

Still, the group has rounded up prominent sponsors for its new mission, including Boeing, Microsoft, the University of Washington, the Museum of Flight, and the Suquamish Tribe. Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels appeared at the opening ceremony, welcoming the astronauts, and cracking a joke about Starbucks’ desire to open new stores on other planets (which I’m not sure all the foreign visitors really got.)

Boeing’s Jim Albaugh, the CEO of the Boeing’s Integrated Defense Systems unit, stressed in his opening keynote speech that the astronauts are in a unique position to push for more resources for space exploration. NASA technologies have contributed to our ability to monitor climate change, hurricanes, artificial hearts and even new high-speed Olympic swimsuits, Albaugh says. It’s also churned out a steady of supply of some of Boeing’s best engineers, he noted. The country’s lack of interest in science and math careers has amounted to “intellectual disarmament,” he says.

“An entire generation was lost,” Albaugh says. “We need a curriculum for the information age, not the industrial age. We can’t wait for another Sputnik to galvanize government to action.”

Exactly what the space program’s priorities ought to be is another matter, which the astronauts and cosmonauts talk about a fair bit, Fabian says. The space explorers have their own views about whether to continue the shuttle program past its scheduled retirement in 2010, and some are clearly nervous about what will happen during the years we’ll have to wait for NASA’s new spacecraft program, called Constellation. “A lot of us are nervous” about the end of the shuttle program and the lack of funding for Constellation, Fabian says. I suggested that if the shuttle were extended past its retirement date it could increase the risk of another disaster. Fabian’s reply: “We always take risk in space flight.”

You get the idea pretty quickly this is an optimistic bunch of people. One of the Russian cosmonauts, Yuri Usachev, was unfazed when asked whether tensions between the U.S. and his country over hostilities in Georgia could derail future cooperation between the two countries’ space programs. “We’ve had situations in the past and we resolved them, and I think we will resolve them again,” he said through an interpreter. That sounds like the kind of hopeful attitude that just might rub off on some children across the state this week.

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Last October marked the 50th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. And next month, Sputnik’s American offspring, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, will also hit its 50th birthday. The milestone has occasioned the biggest flurry of media retrospectives on the space program since Ron Howard’s 1995 film Apollo 13, including two well-made documentaries that aired this week on the Discovery Channel’s HD Theater, When We Left Earth and In the Shadow of the Moon.

If you missed them, it’s worth searching your local listings to catch these two programs when they’re shown again. (They’re also available on DVD and Blu-Ray disc.) Though much of the footage in the two films is familiar, they’re notable because this is the first time most of this material has been shown in high definition. Also, both programs contain extensive new interviews with the surviving astronauts from the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo days—plain-spoken rocket jockeys who are just plain fun to listen to.

I’m a veteran space buff—my first piece of “technology journalism” was a poster on the Saturn V rocket that I designed when I was in the fourth grade—and the Discovery Channel programs sent me on a trip across the Web to see what else I could find in the way of historical images from the Apollo missions. If you follow NASA at all, you know that the Web is the best place to see the raw data coming back from current-day missions like the Mars Phoenix lander and the Spirit and Opportunity rovers (which are still trucking across the Martian surface, four years after they were expected to expire). But it turns out that the Web also holds a vast mine of original data from the Apollo project, and in today’s column I thought I’d point you toward some especially rich veins.

While NASA itself has a large collection of Web resources about the Apollo days, they aren’t particularly well organized, and they tend toward the hagiographic. The two Apollo sites that impress me the most are labors of love created by amateur historians with no direct connections to NASA. One is the Project Apollo Archive, assembled by a Lynchburg, VA, native named Kipp Teague.

Pay no attention to the 1994-era Web graphics and ugly HTML tables (Teague deliberately labels his collection of history sites the “RetroWeb”). The glory of the Project Apollo Archive is the material itself: thousands of photographs scanned from NASA originals, including large-format Hasselblad images captured by astronauts on Apollo 7, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17; hours of MP3 recordings of communications between flight controllers and the astronauts; and a few MPEG videos covering events you don’t see in the TV shows about the moon landings, such as the moment when Apollo 12 lunar module pilot Alan Bean accidentally points the television camera at the sun, destroying its vidicon sensor (and preventing the world from witnessing the rest of the mission on TV).

An even more detailed resource—hosted on a NASA web server but assembled and edited by a former Los Alamos scientist named Eric Jones and a Canadian space buff named Ken Glover—is the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. Destined to be used by historians far into the future, the site is a collection of transcripts of all the recorded conversations between the lunar surface crews and Houston, interwoven with after-the-fact commentary from the editors and from 10 of the 12 astronauts who were actually there. It’s supplemented by MP3 and RealAudio clips of the same transmissions, as well as hundreds of photos, Quicktime VR panoramas, and flight documents, right down to the technical checklists the astronauts wore on the cuffs of their spacesuits.

Here’s one of my favorite passages from the journals. This is from Apollo 17, at the moment when Harrison Schmitt—a PhD geologist, and the only trained scientist to go to the Moon—noticed something unexpected:

145:26:22 Schmitt: Oh, hey! (Very brief pause)
145:26:25 Schmitt: Wait a minute…
145:26:26 [Eugene] Cernan: What?
145:26:27 Schmitt: Where are the reflections? I’ve been fooled once. There is orange soil!!
145:26:32 Cernan: Well, don’t move it until I see it.
145:26:35 Schmitt: (Very excited) It’s all over!! Orange!!!
145:26:38 Cernan: Don’t move it until I see it.
145:26:40 Schmitt: I stirred it up with my feet.
145:26:42 Cernan: (Excited, too) Hey, it is!! I can see it from here!
145:26:44 Schmitt: It’s orange!
145:26:46 Cernan: Wait a minute, let me put my visor up. It’s still orange!
145:26:49 Schmitt: Sure it is! Crazy!
145:26:53 Cernan: Orange!
145:26:54 Schmitt: I’ve got to dig a trench, Houston.
145:27:00 [Bob] Parker [EVA Capcom]: Copy that. I guess we’d better work fast.
145:27:01 Cernan: Hey, he’s not going out of his wits. It really is.
145:27:07 Parker: Is it the same color as cheese?

It turned out that Schmitt had discovered an unusual deposit of volcanic glass—formed under the surface of the moon billions of years earlier and stirred up by a relatively recent meteor impact—with a colorful orange cast that strongly contrasted with the Moon’s generally gray-black soil. (The moment is recreated fairly faithfully in From the Earth to the Moon, a wonderful 1998 TV mini-series produced by Tom Hanks, who, of course, played astronaut Jim Lovell in Apollo 13). If people ever go back to the Moon, … Next Page »

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