Most places in New England can be categorized into one of two buckets: places tourists visit, and places tourists don’t visit. Concord lands squarely in that second bucket. It’s too large to be quaint and charming, but too small to host many of the attractions that a larger city can sustain. It’s not really a college town, which means there’s no perpetual population of 19-year-olds to keep things active. As the state capital, there are the functional trappings of bureaucracies: governmental agency offices, law firms, a higher-than-usual percentage of statues of obscure Great Men, but not enough marble and granite to outweigh the dull red bricks of old mill buildings and 19th century warehouses.
With that in mind, I set my GPS for one of the few actual tourist attractions, the McAuliffe Planetarium, located on the campus of the New Hampshire Technical Institute, on the northern side of town. As it happens, the Planetarium has recently undergone a metamorphosis. Originally a very modest little building dedicated to Christa McAuliffe not long after the Challenger tragedy, construction has barely been completed on an entirely new building expanding it into an actual science museum, and it has been re-christened as the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center, honoring not only the memory of Christa McAuliffe, but the achievements of Astronaut Alan Shepard. Shepard, the first American in space, was a native of Derry, New Hampshire.
It’s a shrewd move on the part of whoever it was that decided to extend the center to honor Shepard. In the first few years after the explosion of the Challenger, there was quite a lot of public mourning, particularly for McAuliffe, and a memorial planetarium was fitting. But the second shuttle disaster transformed the public perception of the shuttle and of NASA into something less than stellar. Embracing the golden days of Project Mercury and the Real American Hero status of Shepard, along with turning the planetarium into a destination that will entertain and educate children for years rather that simply commemorate a fallen teacher, is nothing short of brilliant.
The model of the Redstone rocket, topped with a replica of Shepard’s Freedom 7 Mercury capsule stands right at the entrance to the building, announcing in no uncertain terms that this place is about the thrill of exploring outer space. The new center isn’t even completely finished yet, and so the parking lot was mostly filled with the pickup trucks and SUVs of construction workers. It was opened to the public about a month ago, and it’s evident that they were anxious to get it open for April school vacation whether everything was ready to go or not. Several large signs prominently proclaim the excitement that will be “COMING SOON!!”, just as soon as they can get the installations put together.
The galleries that were open were definitely designed with younger children in mind. On the main floor, the primary exhibit area is about outer space. This glowing orb was capable of becoming each of the planets of the solar system at the press of a button on its console. Here you can see it as the sun, Uranus, Jupiter, and the Milky Way.
A docent was just finishing up a talk for a group of pre-schoolers about Shepard and the Mercury program as I walked around. The kids sat patiently, but as soon as he was done, they jumped up and made their way up the stairs to the second level where an exhibit about natural science was about the only game in town. You have seen these a million times: the displays with cranks, levers, pulleys, handles and all other manner of hands-on demonstrations of basic physics. Kids love anything that they can touch or manipulate, even if they don’t actually pay any attention whatsoever to the scientific principles being demonstrated.
One wall featured some of the brazilion photographs NASA has collected over the last half century; many of them are iconic pictures seared into the brains of everyone in America over the age of 40, some more recent pictures focus instead on the wonders that have been captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. The exhibit suffers for not having the room for or attention paid to a proper photographic exhibition, but is a nice bridge that adults can use to explain the thrill of those years to their children just learning about outer space for the first time.
Back on the first floor, the new building connects to the old building via a corridor that features the space shuttle, but focuses on the successes of Discovery and the other shuttles rather than the unspeakable tragedies of Challenger and Columbia. A life-size mockup of the front of a shuttle includes a 3D computer simulation of landing the craft. One little boy I watched managed to crash his shuttle ass-end-first into the runway with a disquieting electronic “CRUNCH”. Moments like that will be causing plenty of discomfort and awkward explanations for staff and parents for years to come.
The planetarium wasn’t showing until later in the afternoon, so I had to take a pass on that, but the original exhibit areas that go along with the planetarium include several tributes to Christa McAuliffe and a letter from her sent to a fellow Concord-area schoolteacher about six months prior to the Challenger explosion. There are a few models of various space vehicles, and a tiny scrid of moon rock about the size of a wad of chewing gum that was given to the State of New Hampshire after Alan Shepard went to the moon on Apollo 14. I can remember how totally fascinated we were with anything that had the slightest to do with going to the moon back when I was Charlotte’s age, but a 40-year-old plaque with a tiny rock behind a magnifying glass just doesn’t seem to have the same thrill it did back then.
The Discovery Center is just the right speed for little kids, though probably would not hold the attention of anyone over the age of 10 for very long. It entertained me just enough for an hour, and I’m positive that Charlotte would enjoy it, even though she is a habitue of the glitzier Museum of Science in Cambridge.
The noon hour was just upon us as I headed out the door, and so my plan was to make the short drive into Downtown Concord, and explore with the intent of finding a place for lunch. Stay tuned for Part 2.
