Inside the Space Shuttle Bay

Shut­tle Bay by William Beem

I grabbed this shot on the recent trip to Kennedy Space Cen­ter. It’s the inte­rior of Space Shut­tle Explorer. For those of you who haven’t yet vis­ited KSC, Explorer is a full-​size mockup of a shut­tle, so I didn’t have any spe­cial access. For a while, I thought this was a slightly smaller ver­sion. When I walked around the Shut­tle Enter­prise at the National Air & Space Museum, it just seemed much larger on the exte­rior than Explorer. Per­haps it was the dif­fer­ence between see­ing Enter­prise in a hangar and Explorer out in the open.

This is one of those times when I felt like Clark W. Gris­wold look­ing at the Grand Canyon. After you look at it, you just bounce your head a cou­ple of times and then it’s time to go. Yep, there it is. You can’t walk into it, there’s no inter­ac­tiv­ity. Behind this view is a glass panel with a view into the cock­pit. There’s a space suit there, but the glare from the glass panel really pre­vents you from get­ting a good view inside. I still tried tak­ing some shots and I’ll see if I can do any­thing with them, but mostly you see reflec­tions of Euro­pean tourists wear­ing plaid shorts.

For a moment, though, you look inside the shut­tle bay and think, “this is pretty cool.” That’s the moment I’ve decided to keep.