by John Fletcher

Fifteen of us got into the mini-bus waiting at the Park Plaza Hotel as if we had been going to the moon itself. There were loads of interesting things to be seen on the way to the Space Station, but I noticed more of them on the return journey.

Our guide for the tour who met us when we got there was an astronaut, Dr Patty Hilliard Robertson, who summed up at a glance what is needed to become an astronaut. You do not have to be a Wodehousian, but her mother-in-law is a friend of Toni Rudersdorf, and I believe Toni herself has been involved in the medical side of this vast activity, measuring the bone mineral density of astronauts coming back from weightlessness.

For every 30,000 people who apply to become astronauts, NASA accept 30. Technically, highly qualified. Enthusiastic about space: she had applied many times before being accepted. Popular, and "GSOH" as the Lonely Hearts columns say, "Good Sense Of Humour". How else could you survive with the same few people in the confined space of a module without getting on their nerves? Placid, temperamentally balanced: able to cope with life-threatening emergencies constructively as well as calmly. Attractive; indeed she had been married two months before and her good-looking husband joined us for the tour. So Patty's charm told us something about being an astronaut before we began to look at the training modules.

There were no restrictions on taking photographs. (I had no camera.) It felt rather like being invited into the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment and told you could take as many photographs as you liked. As one who has been caught up in security at AWRE it seemed to me that "open government" had really begun. It was a happy place.

It is vast and you go down thin corridors looking much like corridors in any other large corporation, often with windows into the rooms on both sides. Through the windows you see, perhaps more than elsewhere, computers sitting on desks. Frequently there were group photographs, of smallish groups like cricket teams or rowing eights, but evidently groups who had worked together on some project.

There was all the excitement of developing not just a new form of transport but a way of going where no other transport could go. We saw a model of a giant space station and it took hardly any imagination to see this as the holiday for those who had been everywhere else. And there is the excitement of feeling that new answers to research questions are coming in all the time.

It reminded me of many Research stations I know; the Building Research Establishment at Watford, for instance. Many large brick and concrete buildings, some of the largest not subdivided, but used for large-scale experiments or models. Beside these models or mock-ups there would be standard steps up with railings, leading to platforms to go aboard or to inspect.

But another idea came to me that in some ways these were from the past as much as the future; like drawings I had seen of early Industrial Revolution buildings in Birmingham or Yorkshire. The same large spaces, the same huge pieces of engineering, the same steps up to inspect, the same organisational pride. Perhaps all new technologies have to look the same.

Most of the training capsules were actually being used for training, but we visited a few. We went inside one up the steepest metal ladder you've ever seen, duck or you hit your head (hard luck), there you are. Not enough room to swing a weasel. We could only go two at a time, plus our guide, because that was all there was room for. On one side a giant "dashboard" with a million lights and handles and computer screens. Patty explained that it was not all as sophisticated as it looked, but it was impossible anyway to take in how much of it there was. On the other side, two odd-shaped windows, looking out on what should have been the room we had been waiting in, but was apparently the mocked-up or virtual view as it might be in space; here the deck of the spacecraft, there an arm for doing engineering jobs in space, far away and a bit fuzzy a small moon. Then it was time to let another two in.

There were other training modules we saw. The one where you can sleep, weightless in space, standing up strapped into your vertical cupboard. With (if you like) something to stop your head lolling about. The problems of weightlessness are unending. She invited us into the what is called the "WCS" adding with a sly twinkle we might be able to guess what that was for. (It stood, officially, for Waste Control Systems.) There were two varieties of model loo, both technologically advanced. In the first, you have to sit down quite centrally; and there is a screen-monitor in front of you so you can see how central you are. In another you have clamp arms that hold both your thighs in position. And there were more technical details that it was fascinating to see but would be scarcely Wodehousian to discuss.

At the end, and without a sign of writer's cramp, she gave us all signed photographs of herself with our own names on and a message. (Her handsome husband had slipped away at this stage, slightly to the annoyance of some of the women in the party who had hoped to have a photo of him.) She said good-bye, and we went to the large Shopping Mall where (unless I misunderstood) you normally have to queue, and pay, simply to go in. Having to pay to enter a Shopping Mall was a new idea to me. Do Americans love shopping so much? But in fact we seemed to be able to go inside without tickets; I don't know how that was done. Perhaps the password was "Wodehouse".

And then the return journey. Among the things I noticed on the way home were the oil-wells on all sides. I associate "oil-well" with pylon-like things in Arabia or superstructures in the North Sea. These were quaint by comparison; the size of any old parish water-well but without the thatched roof; just a few exposed pipes.

I will spend weeks taking it all in. Many thanks to those who organised it.

John Fletcher

Sad PS.  Patty Robertson died on Friday 25th May, 2001, after being in an aircrash.