CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- More than a dozen men who carried the nation's dreams into space came to the Astronaut Hall of Fame on Friday as the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex officially took charge of the tourist attraction.
Today, the festivities continue at KSC, with a performance by the astronaut band Max-Q, meals with astronauts, autographs with cast members of "The Right Stuff" and the induction of four astronauts into the hall of fame: Sally Ride, Robert "Hoot" Gibson, Story Musgrave and Dan Brandenstein.
"We had the utmost admiration for each other," Apollo astronaut Walt Cunningham said of the astronauts on hand for the ribbon-cutting at the hall. "We would have bet our lives on each other, and in fact, we did."
KSC Director Roy Bridges cut the ribbon after Jim Lovell, the Apollo 13 commander who heads the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, counted him down.
A crowd of tourists and kids from KSC Space Camp applauded heartily for the spacefarers: Buzz Aldrin, Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, Bob Crippen, Cunningham, Owen Garriott, Ed Gibson, Fred Haise, Rick Hauck, Jack Lousma, Ed Mitchell, Al Worden and John Young.
"It's a good opportunity, because we really don't have too many things that get us together very often," Haise said. At "The Right Stuff" Gala, held at the Saturn V Center after the ceremony, several astronauts expressed confidence that NASA's work would continue despite the Columbia accident.
"We're going to recover from that," Lovell said. "You have to remember that spaceflight is not a particularly safe occupation."
"I think that we would like to go to Mars sometime," Skylab astronaut Jack Lousma said. "We'd like to go back to the moon. We'd like to spend more time on the space station with more people. We'd like to have space be a household word for everyone in the country."
Lousma said he'd like to go to Mars. "I may even go back to space again when I'm as old as John Glenn," he quipped. "I'm not old enough to go back yet."
Glenn, who flew both Mercury and shuttle flights, joined the crowd of astronauts at the gala.
Cunningham said he'd like to fly again, too, but not as a space tourist. Space tourism "changes the whole tenor of what we do," he said.
"It's not something you can do with a couple of months' training," Cunningham said, " . . . and the tourists leave the impression that it's nothing to it."
KSC is welcoming Earthbound tourists, however, to the Hall of Fame.
"This is a great asset to the Space Coast as a tourism entity," said Dan LeBlanc, chief operating officer of Delaware North Parks Services of Spaceport, which operates the Visitor Complex.
"If somebody hadn't stepped forward, this priceless collection would have gone every which way," he said. "The Smithsonian would have taken their pieces, and the astronauts, it would have all come apart. It would have been awful."
The Hall of Fame gives people a new reason to visit Kennedy Space Center, he said, and KSC is bringing more people to the hall, whose financial troubles nearly forced it to close permanently.
"Even with tourism down, the Hall of Fame has set a record for attendance this year," LeBlanc said. The number of visitors should surpass 150,000 in 2003, he said. He expects resident space camps -- not just the day camps currently held at the hall -- to resume as well.
Among the guests at the gala were "Right Stuff" actors Lance Henrikson, who played Wally Schirra; Pamela Reed, who played Trudy Cooper; and Scott Wilson, who played test pilot Scott Crosfield.
"The Right Stuff" experience gave Henrikson great respect for those in the space program, he said, and seeing the Saturn V rocket preserved at KSC, "I'm as blown away now as I was then. I love the whole NASA project."
"It's really just an incredible experience to be at a site where so much history has taken place and ongoing history being made," Wilson echoed.
Reed said her role in the film, which is being released in a special-edition DVD, gave her insight into a time when women had to step back and let their husbands take the spotlight.
"It's exhilarating for me to see people like Sally Ride, because I played a woman who was a pilot who couldn't fly and had to sit back and be the good wife," Reed said. ". . . I'm glad to see women in the space program."
Published under license from FLORIDA TODAY. Copyright © 2003 FLORIDA TODAY. No portion of this material may be reproduced in any way without the written consent of FLORIDA TODAY.
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