I'm standing over a scale model of the space toilet.
“Can I?”
“No!” the lady from NASA looks angry. I get down off the table and move on to a display about new NASA technologies.
A nice engineer lets me try the new space glove. It's 97 degrees Fahrenheit. I ask if he has anything that won't make my hand sweat, and we get on to the subject of a new moon buggy that has six wheels and can go in all directions, and there are people whose job it is to drive it until it breaks.
“My last car crapped two engines out its bottom in less than three months.” Once it was in the middle of a busy intersection while my housemate's farting rottweiler gobbled up the seatbelts in the back.
“That's nice,” he tells me. He puts the space glove away.
“Bet I can wreck the moon buggy,” I tell him. “Does it have a CD player or is it still tapes?”
After about half an hour, I've got an invitation to the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, but no keys to the moon buggy.
Every July in Washington, the Smithsonian chooses three cultures for its Folklife Festival, but they've pretty much shot their load, and if it weren't for the fall of the Iron Curtain, this would have happened a decade ago. This year, they have chosen Bhutan (the remaining country), Texas and NASA. Given my recent space-binge, which will end as soon as someone gives me a good book about otters or Nikola Tesla, we head straight for space culture. You're not allowed to bounce on the giant inflatable shuttle and you can't have any space food.
It's a little less shit than Washington as a whole, which is beige and crawling with senatorial interns and former captains of the debate team, swaggering around the place like a bunch of class presidents. Washington is a city populated by people whose personalities closely match their resumes. They won't eat fat calories or jaywalk, but they'll probably fuck you in a public toilet if you can get them a job in the Cato Institute. We spend three hours at the NASA tents.
My husband sips his limeade and walks a few steps further behind me every time I ask someone, “Are you really from space?”
We go to a talk by a food engineer who shows us dehydrated shrimp cocktail with a shelf-life of five years. She doesn't come out and say it, but we leave fairly sure that NASA's plan is eventually to abandon Earth and go live on Mars. I suggest we wait around so I can tell her I don't like shrimp cocktail, but there's a kid kicking my chair, so I give up. It's not going to be until about 2050, and there won't be any fish.
No one at the NASA festival of space culture tells us that the hydrogen bubbles in space food gives the astronauts bad farts, nor that the second thing Buzz Aldrin did on the moon was pee. One NASA person (Nasite? Nasian? Nasshole?) tells me that while there is no belt of astronaut shit orbiting the earth, there is a very narrow ring of pee around our planet. It is said to be beautiful.
We go to an oral history tent, where some anthropologists or sociologists are collecting stories about people's experiences of space. I write how Mark Arbeene was laughing when he told me the Challenger blew up, and he was the meanest kid in my class, and that I think we should probably give poor people some health care before we go back to the Moon.
A guy comes to the desk. “I worked at Goddard [Space Flight Center] in the 1950s. I would like to tell my story, but I don't have time right now – is there a way to do this online?”
The anthropologists or sociologists whisper at each other. Then, “Uh, no. Sorry.”
“There's....Will this be displayed anywhere online?”
“We haven't got that far yet.”
Uh oh.
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