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Tag: museums

Panoramic view of the Saturn V.

Johnson Space Center from Gemini to the shuttle era

Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas is synonymous with NASA’s human spaceflight program for much of the general public—especially those of us who grew up watching Apollo 13. In 2003, back when I was a high schooler, I visited Johnson Space Center for a nerdy spring break. Twenty years later, I revisited my memories and video footage from that trip to make the video embedded above about the history of JSC and what I saw when I visited.

Photos from my 2003 visit to Johnson Space Center: Your blogger and his parents posing between the S-IC and S-II stages of the Saturn V rocket on display.

Photos from my 2003 visit to Johnson Space Center: Your blogger and his parents posing between the S-IC and S-II stages of the Saturn V rocket on display.

My father taking a photo of the Saturn V.

My father taking a photo of the Saturn V.

Panoramic view of the Saturn V.

Panoramic view of the Saturn V.

In writing the script for this video, I relied heavily on Suddenly, Tomorrow Came…: A History of the Johnson Space Center, by Henry C. Dethloff [PDF]. It is a NASA History book, and as usual for books in that series, it is academic and well-researched, but also well-written. Other NASA History books I referred to included The Space Shuttle Decision, by T.A. Heppenheimer [PDF]; and Stages to Saturn, by Roger Bilstein [PDF, print].

For a video of this length, in which only a portion of it consists of footage that I shot, it was a real challenge to find archival footage or stills to match the narration. The NASA Image and Video Library was useful, and I always looked there first. Its holdings are limited, though, especially for material older than 10 or 15 years. The best source for archival footage of the Apollo program in particular was the National Archives and Records Administration, which has quite a lot of digitized footage, much of which is in HD. NARA was less useful for the Space Shuttle. I also found Internet Archive to be indispensable, because it has plenty of high-res stills and mostly low-res videos about the Space Shuttle, which I couldn’t find anywhere else even though they were created by NASA.

Back in 2003, consumer-grade HD video cameras were not widely available. Camcorders recorded video on tapes in SD (480p), either in analog format or digitally. I used a Sony DCR-TRV340 camcorder, which recorded digital video in D8 format on tapes that were backward-compatible with the analog Hi8 tapes that our previous camcorder had used. The camera had an IEEE 1394 Firewire port, which allowed a computer to capture video from the tapes in lossless digital format. Since I no longer have a computer with a Firewire card, I used a ClearClick Video2Digital Converter to transfer footage to my computer for this video. The quality of the transfer probably wasn’t perfect, but it was definitely good enough.

Overall, my video footage from 2003 was of disappointing quality. The cuts and camera movements were fast, and the colors were ugly. I couldn’t do much about the camerawork, but I could adjust the exposure and colors in Premiere, vastly improving the appearance of the picture. I’ll make it a point to do these adjustments whenever I use my old video footage in the future.

mom-in-svmf-comparison

mom-with-sic-comparison

Side-by-side comparisons of camcorder shots before and after manipulation.

Side-by-side comparisons of camcorder shots before and after manipulation.

Sources for the video

Bilstein, Roger E. Stages to Saturn: A Technological History of the Apollo/Saturn Launch Vehicles. 1980; repr. Washington, DC: NASA History Office, 1996.

Dethloff, Henry C. Suddenly, Tomorrow Came…: A History of the Johnson Space Center. N.p. [Houston, TX]: Johnson Space Center, 1993.

Heppenheimer, T.A. The Space Shuttle Decision: NASA’s Search for a Reusable Space Vehicle. Washington, DC: NASA History Office, 1999.

Olasky, Charles. “Shuttle Mission Simulator.” NASA conference publication, 11th Space Simulation Conference, 1980. NTRS, 19810005636.

Remodeling Nehru’s house

In the three years since I did a little of my dissertation research there, the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) in New Delhi has become the subject of controversy over plans to remodel the museum or its surrounding grounds.

As much as I like NMML, I grant that the museum could use a good remodeling. It is housed in Teen Murti Bhawan, a British-era mansion that was originally built as the Commander-in-Chief’s house before independence, and after independence served as the official residence of India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. After Nehru’s death in 1964, the house was converted into a museum rather than serving as the official residence of subsequent Prime Ministers.

Backside of Teen Murti Bhawan.

Backside of Teen Murti Bhawan.

The bottom floor of the house has exhibits about Nehru’s life and the independence movement. It is a standard textbook-style narrative, and it is quite unengagingly presented with black-and-white photographs and hard-to-read text in English and Hindi. The upper floor has some preserved rooms, including Nehru’s office and the bedroom where he died. The rooms are certainly interesting too look at, but they are not in the best of condition. I remember seeing water damage on the ceiling in one or two of them.

View of Nehrus office in Teen Murti Bhawan.

View of Nehru’s office in Teen Murti Bhawan.

The bedroom that Nehru's daughter Indira Gandhi used when she stayed at Teen Murti Bhawan.

The bedroom that Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi used when she stayed at Teen Murti Bhawan.

Surreal Lok Sabha replica, with trompe-l'oeil walls, mannequins of MPs, and spots on the benches for real people to sit too. I really hope this is preserved in any remodeling of the museum

Surreal Lok Sabha replica, with trompe-l’oeil walls, mannequins of MPs, and spots on the benches for real people to sit too. I really hope this is preserved in any remodeling of the museum.

The house is located on a large landscaped estate, which also includes a research library, a planetarium, and a medieval hunting lodge that was incorporated into the site plan when the mansion was built.

SLV-3, India's first satellite launcher, on display next to the planetarium at Teen Murti.

SLV-3, India’s first satellite launcher, on display next to the planetarium at Teen Murti.

Proposals to remodel NMML go in two different directions. One direction is modernizing the existing displays but keeping the nationalistic, Nehru-centered narrative intact. This is outlined in a document posted on the NMML website, “New Design Plan for the Nehru Museum,” from September 2015. The black-and-white photographs and hard-to-read text will go, to be replaced by touchscreens.

The other direction for remodeling the museum is completely overhauling it to honor all prime ministers, not just Nehru. This seems to be favored by the current ruling party, the BJP, which has made it a point to play down the legacy of Nehru.

From what I can tell, the proposals have reached a compromise of sorts, with Teen Murti Bhawan set to stay as it is and a national prime ministers museum to be built somewhere else on the estate.

These proposals to remodel Nehru’s house are at their heart political, but I would like to look at them from a historical perspective—or rather a historiographical perspective, which means how history is interpreted.

I don’t know enough about the national prime ministers museum proposal to comment on it, but from studying the “New Design Plan for the Nehru Museum,” I feel that it has missed an opportunity to reinterpret Nehru and his legacy in an appropriately critical light. As is it now, there is no room in Indian popular discourse for a critical discussion of Nehru. He can be either all good or all bad, and the debates about remodeling NMML fall into these predictable ruts.

Like every leader in the history of this planet, Nehru left a mixed legacy. This legacy should be open for interpretation, but it shouldn’t be inevitably polarized. Like many leaders of his time, Nehru promoted industrial growth and democratization at the expense of minority communities. He proudly trumpeted anti-colonialism but refused to criticize Soviet interventions in eastern Europe. He claimed to believe in democracy and self-determination but took a firm line on Kashmir and brutally suppressed an insurgency in Nagaland. This ambiguity in Nehru’s legacy needs to be taken seriously, not papered over by heroizing or villainizing narratives.

But isn’t it inevitable that a museum dedicated to one man’s legacy would portray him as a hero? I argue that it is not. As an example to the contrary, consider the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and Museum in Austin, Texas, USA. As president of the United States from 1963 to 1969, Johnson had as mixed a legacy as Nehru. He promoted civil rights legislation and social welfare programs known as the Great Society. But he also escalated the the American war in Vietnam, a war that left over a million people dead. The LBJ Library does not softpedal Johnson’s role in escalating the war.

The same approach can and should be taken for a remodeling of NMML. Nehru’s contested legacy should be acknowledged and explored in the museum dedicated to him.

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and President and First Lady Johnson in Washington, DC, March 1966.

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and President and First Lady Johnson in Washington, DC, March 1966.

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