NASA Ames 75th Anniversary Open House

Oh. my. stars. … wow. The 75^th anniversary open house was the craziest experience ever. We got on VTA light rail in Mountain View, since the line to take the shuttle looked like the opening of a new ride at Disney. The traffic was so bad in downtown Mountain View, it didn’t even look like the shuttle buses were moving. We watched the scores of people, passed them — jumped on a jam packed light rail train to the NASA station. We were met with the same chaos when we arrived at NASA, walked right past the shuttle buses again, and headed towards hangar one. Since we arrived around 1:30, we didn’t see any check point to where people were taking our tickets, checking our bags, nothing. We just wandered in … yes, wandered in with thousands of people onto government property.
After cruising through hangar one, we decided to check out the gift shop. We were met with more hoards of people standing in line. I instantly felt sorry for every NASA employee and volunteer that day, since everyone just looked incredibly stressed.
Since we are complete food whores, our next goal was to find the food trucks. As soon as we spotted them, we picked a truck with the SHORTEST LINE. (Yeah, people. that’s how I roll) We grabbed some Thai tacos and sat down to eat. I think the only people that came out ahead that day were the food trucks, since they had a captive audience of 150,000 people. We hit «Sweet Street» of all dessert trucks, and got an ice cream taco. (Again, the shortest line.) Well, that’s actually a lie, since there was no one in line at the cupcake truck, but who wants to eat a cupcake on a hot day, right?
So by the time we got in, cruised around and got some food, it was already 4pm. We made our way back towards the light rail to head home. Hundreds of us packed on to the light rail platform, being instructed to head all the way towards the back. Thirty minutes later a train arrived, and completely passed us by since it was only a 2 car train. The train was instantly packed and took off.
Minutes later a VTA employee started barking out orders for us to head towards the back of the platform. I promptly bit off her head by explaining we just missed the last train by following their instructions. Thankfully I had another girl chime in and regurgitate the same complaints that we all had. For a moment I was slightly nervous that I was going to throw down with a light rail employee. The next train arrived, and we all packed on like sardines.
We basically didn’t see anything that NASA had to offer. Embarrassing. I would assume after this fiasco, they will never open their doors to the public again.

More than 120,000 people showed up. Each person waited at least 3 hours to get in and out of the complex, not including the lines to see wind tunnel, aircraft, etc. At best case, NASA wasted 3*120K manhours, or 360K manhours, or 45K work days (each work day is 8 hours), or 123 man-​years.
Suppose half of the 120K people are working adults, then at SF minimum wage, NASA wasted 60K*$ 10.74/hr*3 hours =~ 2 million USD. And suppose only ¼ of them are fresh out of college engineers earning at $ 100K yearly salary (~$ 48/​hour), then NASA wasted 30K*$ 48/hr*3=~4 million USD.
I suppose this is pocket money to the government. But really, what can possibly be worse than DMV? NASA Ames open house of course! It was such a disaster that it was more tragic than the Challenger fiasco. Thanks a lot,
Yours truly,
Unhappy Tax Payer

Average NASA employee’s inner dialogue at some point in the day ‘We are a goddamn research facility not frickin’ Space Mountain!’ #GoTeamAmes

Total waste of time. All you do is just walk around the campus and read some posters in the booths. Best we did was to climb into cockpit of a helicopter and the belly of a recon plane. I thought we would go inside the labs and checkout cool things they are building/​researching. I think the huge crowd was there because of the same expectation. Why spend so much money and effort to just show the cardboard posters? People could have just googled it out. Agree with the other poster. The entry time on the ticket was bogus. Nobody even checked tickets. NASA, please set the expectation correct next time.
That said, organization of the event was good. VTA, Shuttles, potties, food trucks etc. took care of throngs well. Oh, well, it generated some revenue for vendors… and can’t complain about eye candy either.

To say that I’m disappointed is an understatement. So NASA decided to have an open house for the 1^st time in 75 years. it sounded like a great idea, they even made it so intriguing by saying only limited tickets are available and that only people with pre-​booked tickets would be allowed to enter. well apparently that was all just false advertising.
The tickets have time that’s supposedly represent the entry time, ours was at 1pm. Online it noted that we could enter anytime after the time listed on the ticket.
They provided shuttle from downtown mountain view, thinking that would be a good idea we decided to check it out only to find thousands of people lining up for the shuttle. .seriously the line was sooooooo long that it went around and around the whole caltrain station and I couldn’t even see the end of the line!!!
Parking in the downtown was madness too I think bc everyone parked there to catch the shuttle, we finally decided to drive to the Easy st neighborhood and finally got lucky finding parking (it was about a mile and a half from the Moffett entrance to NASA).
When we got there we realized that they didn’t check tickets so thousands of people with or without tickets could actually enter. it we knew… we would have gone early in the morning! It felt like there was no security at all since they didn’t even check anyone’s purse or bags. even getting to the AT&T Park is a lot more strict with the metal detector, bag check etc.
The whole open house basically was just a walk around the NASA compound. We couldn’t get in to the buildings, we were just walking in the streets and there were booths of exhibits, most of them were impossible to check out due to the amount of crowds. each booth probably had 100 – 200 people crowding them that all we could see were people’s heads!!! Most of the booths had no other than card-​boards posters with writings on them, with the thousands of people there it was impossible to check it out!!!
The lamest of all was that they put out this robot thing that picks up and throws a ball. It was controlled by a remote, moved very slowly and the throw was very gentle… not interesting at all. even a roomba is more high tech!
They also had inflatable giant rockets and what looked like r2d2. .inflatables that’s worse than a bouncy house at birthday parties bc this thing just stood up and couldn’t be played with… people took pictures with them though which i thought hilarious! !!
Not sure if we would have gotten there earlier we probably could have seen more but the guy at the info table even said, «well.not sure if you call it exciting, it’s probably interesting» …so i guess he himself thought the whole thing is kinda lame…
O well… there u go. check it off the bucket list I guess.
Oh, this feels more like a long walk vs attending an open house!!! We certainly got at least 5 miles worth of walking! !!!
The pro: portal potties… lots of them, so no line to do your business. .but they ran out of water to wash hands.