The National Space Centre

Market Harborough, 0 miles, 0 locks

Another glorious day and probably my last chance to see the Space Centre in Leicester, given that they'll be shut tomorrow as it's Monday. The X3 bus doesn't run on Sunday so I had to catch the train, but that gave me an opportunity to talk to someone about compensation for the delay on Friday and I could buy tickets for this week's trips to London.

When I got to the station the ticket office had a notice saying it was closed, so I went to use the 'FastTicket' machine. I was able to choose the ticket I wanted straightforwardly enough and I shoved my credit card in to pay. Usual rigmarole: type in PIN, wait around for it to have a think, card back, then tickets. Except that after giving me my card back, it continued to claim that it was authorising my payment. After a minute or two I knew something was up and sure enough bits of Windows started to break through the display, including the Windows control panel. Why oh why oh why won't people learn that Windows is an unreliable consumer-level desktop operating system, not a hardened robust system for building embedded applications? The number of times you see either a windows error message or Blue Screen Of Death on machines that the public need to rely on, like airport arrivals/departures screens, ATMs and, well, train ticket machines, beggars belief. Anyway, it turns out that the ticket office did have someone in it and I went over to complain. They didn't seem to think that the ticket machine crashing while it was trying to take money out of my account was much of a problem, that it didn't do it often, and that they'd had no complaints. The ticket office fella wandered over to the machine, looked at it, pressed the close box on the Windows Control Panel window, then wandered back to the ticket office as though it was no big deal. "There you go—try again," he said. I declined and asked to buy my tickets from him instead, asking also about tickets for Tuesday and Wednesday. I also made sure I picked up two compensation forms—one for Friday and one in case I'd been debited by the abominable ticket machine—then raced up to the platform with a minute to go before my train was due to depart.

My wandering around Leicester last week meant that I thought I had a good idea of how to get to the Space Centre from the train station, but not a good sense of how far it is. I'm not the world's fastest walker, but it took best part of an hour to thread my way into the centre of town, out the other side, along the dual carriageway of the inner ring-road, past the sad bus depot, the luxury flats of the Shoe Factory ("Open Day—flats from £125,000") and along the Soar. The Abbey Pumping Station was doing its best to attract me back there, as it was Steam Day and everything was up and working, but I was trying to be focussed and ignored its beautifully engineered charms for the stark modernity of space.

The Space Centre building is a marvel of high-tech. It's a big tall thing, as you'd expect from something that's likely to have rockets in it, but instead of building it from glass or concrete, there's a modest concrete tower to support the ventilation and emergency stairs, then the rest of the tower is made from gigantic curved air pockets, not unlike the 'trapped air' pillows that people pack things in boxes with, to stop them from getting damaged.  These have little grey spots printed on them to reflect sunlight, yet they still allow a degree of transparency to make the inside bright and airy. Inside it's like every other 'modern' museum, with lots of interactive exhibits, flashy displays, models and a cinema. I'd not been in there long before I realised that I wasn't sure what I was expecting to get out of it. I was surprised to find that I seem to know a lot about the training that astronauts undergo and how people work in space, and I'd followed the various probes that we've sent out to explore the solar system enough to have a good understanding of what they've found, so what really stood out for me were the actual bits of space hardware. I'd never seen a space suit before or 'space cutlery' (which looks like it came from Ikea). There was quite a lot of stuff that Helen Sharman (the only British astronaut to have actually been in space) brought back from her time on Mir in 1991, which although humdrum, has the glamour of having been off-world. Surprisingly, most of the stuff in the centre is from Russia rather than the USA, which perhaps reflects the less elitist attitude that the Russians seem to have about this kind of thing; or maybe the Smithsonian have first ebbs on NASA's old tat. Who knows?

The hightlights of the visit, I have to say, were the bit of actual moon rock (I really was in awe of that), the film "Stars" that is narrated by Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker out of Star Wars) and—best of all—an actual Soyuz spacecraft that we'd rescued from rotting away in a park somewhere in Russia. I hadn't appreciated until that point just how small spacecraft are. I mean, I know that hardware is expensive to get into space and that every ounce counts, but really this stuff is as small as it can be to do the job. I'm sure that when I finally get to see a Lunar Lander, it'll be the size of a 1960's Mini!

Would I recommend the Space Centre? Well, if you've got kids then the answer is a definite yes. We've got a lot of problems on this planet and we really need to get on and solve them, but I firmly believe that we have to have one eye to the future and that space is probably where that future lies. The story of space is also mainly about people who've done extraordinary things, whether to build something that can leave this world or to be a passenger on it. I think we need to remind ourselves that we can do great things if we try. No deity necessary (as Star Trek's Mr Spock once said). But otherwise...it has to be the Abbey Pumping Station on a steam day, no question.

Back to Harborough on the train and a low-rent dinner in KFC before heading to the Union Inn for the quiz. No sign of Dave and Pam, which was disappointing, so I start the quiz by myself. I'm really floundering when they turn up and it's delightful to see them again. Straight away they apply themselves to the task of answering the many questions I couldn't, but it didn't help. Once again we came 3rd last. Oh well, at least we're consistent. They're off bright and early tomorrow, so after the quiz we say our goodbyes on the wharf, but I'm sure our paths will cross again and I look forward to when that happens.

Tip from the top: M&S Percy Pigs are No. 10 on Vogue magazine's "Do not miss" list, which is the exactly the excuse we've needed to justify buying them. And I've just realised that I've started calling this place "Harborough" the way the natives do. Time I left!