PASADENA -- A Space Tourism Expo slated for Labor Day weekend at the Pasadena Conference Center was canceled because NASA pulled some of its exhibits and funding didn't come through, organizers said.
"The expo was primarily focused on showing the general public that they had a future in space," said Larry Evans, the expo's exhibit coordinator and director. "This wasn't just a thing where you had to be a government astronaut with a Ph.D."
But things fell apart when several key investors pulled their funding after a downturn in the stock market, Evans said.
Also, NASA's Marshall Spaceflight Center and Dryden Flight Research Center pulled relatively large exhibits, and other exhibitors followed suit when they learned NASA wasn't participating, he said.
"We had some major plans for exhibits from NASA that we had been working on for over a year and most of that fell through at the last minute, literally," he said.
Four NASA centers -- the other two were the Ames Research Center and Johnson Space Center -- gave various reasons for not being able to provide exhibits.
Marshall Spaceflight Center, for example, told expo organizers it couldn't provide a large trailer exhibit called "Starship 2040" because it was already booked elsewhere, Evans said.
But he and the expo's executive producer, John Spencer, contend that's not the real reason. Marshall and the other three centers pulled exhibits because NASA Administrator Dan Goldin is opposed to space tourism, they say.
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"I got people to admit that basically the reason Marshall bowed out completely ... was that they were informed by NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., that they were not to participate in any event that used the (phrase) 'space tourism,' " Evans said.
NASA spokeswoman Debra Rahn said that's not true. Marshall's Starship exhibit was already committed to the Cleveland Air Show that weekend, Rahn said.
"Mr. Goldin did not give any directions for NASA centers to pull their exhibits from the expo," she said. "NASA never made a commitment ever to participate in this expo. There obviously is a lot of bad information out there from the organizers."
Evans said the next step is to regroup and try again, this time without NASA and with more emphasis on the future of space exploration rather than space tourism.
"We just can't count on (NASA) anymore," he said.
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