Ex-NASA scientist is driving force behind Microsoft co-founder's mix of fantasy, science.

SEATTLE -- The nation's first museum honoring science fiction is still two months away from opening, but the former NASA scientist now managing it said everyone is in such a frenzy you'd think the launch was only days away.

"Buzz Aldrin just called me (yesterday) morning to say how excited he was about this," said Donna Shirley, former manager of the Mars exploration program for NASA. Shirley is director of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's new Science Fiction Museum located in the so-called "blue potato" portion of the Experience Music Project building, or EMP, at the Seattle Center.

Aldrin, the astronaut who along with Neil Armstrong was first to set foot on the moon, is an enthusiastic proponent of space exploration. Like many in the space program, Shirley noted, he recognizes the role science fiction plays in encouraging people to think about where to boldly go next.

"Science fiction is very important, very powerful," said Shirley, who recently returned to visit her former NASA colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., during the successful Mars rover landings of the robots Spirit and Opportunity.

A half-scale model of an earlier rover, Sojourner, that she and her team landed on Mars in 1997 is just one of the artifacts and exhibits that will be featured at Allen's museum. Allen said last year that one of his primary goals in this project is to show how science fiction contributes to "real" science. About 13,000 square feet of the Frank Gehry-designed EMP will be dedicated to the new Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame. This new sci-fi wing will have three levels of exhibit space and add more than 1,000 square feet of performance space to EMP. Exhibits and artifacts celebrating such movies and television programs as "Star Trek," "Planet of the Apes" and "Dr. Strangelove" will be complemented by objects or exhibits aimed at demonstrating how the literary genre sometimes leads to real scientific developments or technological achievements. Shirley traces her own career in NASA back to the science fiction books she read as a child in Oklahoma in the early 1950s. She was the first woman to manage a major program at NASA.

The facility, in its final phase of construction, is organized along four categories:

• Homeworld includes a Hall of Fame of sci-fi authors, as well as a "Not So Weird Science" exhibit showing how sci-fi leads to new inventions and ideas.

• Fantastic Voyages celebrates other worlds and the means to get out there (like the spacecraft "Nostromo" from the movie "Alien").

• Brave New Worlds uses sophisticated computer technology to look at some fantastic futuristic worlds featured in movies like "The Matrix" or "Blade Runner" -- as well as looking at what kind of choices we need to make now to avoid such places.

• Them! gets you up close and personal with creatures you might only want to see on a movie screen. The exhibit also includes a serious examination of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI.

The museum is expected to open in mid-June.

source:

http://www.indystar.com/

By Tom Paulson

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

April 18, 2004