CLEAR LAKE CITY, Texas — To find the saltier, soulful side of this space community, take a right off NASA Road 1 onto Egret Bay Boulevard just south of the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center.
Then take another hard right into the unmarked and unpaved parking lot of what appears to be a rural Kansas chicken coop scooped up by a twister and deposited in South Texas. Open a battered door and walk into a black hole guarded by saloon doors done up as twin brunettes in red vinyl bikinis.
This is the Outpost, an unrighteous Right Stuff bar soaked in 20 years of stale beer and the blood, sweat, tears and laughter of astronauts in after-hours mode.
“It’s just the place where astronauts and engineers from NASA have always come to blow off steam,” said co-owner Stan Alden.
This Bible Belt community about 20 miles southeast of Houston has mourned and honored the crew of the Columbia in all of its pristine churches and temples. And they’ve mourned them in the stately NASA headquarters just up the road.
Yet, within the red barn siding of the Outpost there has been mourning like at no other place. Here they’ve been conducting the astronaut’s version of an Irish wake. But few gathered at the bar or tables have discussed what happened.
“People were in and out of here all day and night on Saturday, and I didn’t hear anyone talk about what had happened just hours before. They didn’t need to. They were mostly just hugging each other and sitting quiet,” said Sharon Alden, Stan’s wife and business partner.
With an old couch in one corner and small tables scattered about, the Outpost is like a family den for its regulars.
One particularly avid Outpost enthusiast, astronaut Bill Shepherd, who served as the first commander of the international space station, is reputed to have decorated his Moscow apartment as an homage to the Outpost while he trained with the Russian cosmonauts.
The clientele here know intimately the risks that astronauts take as explorers.
“A couple retired astronauts were in here last night and they said, ‘Hey, this is what we do. We know there are risks going up and coming down,’ ” said Stan Alden. “If the astronauts who died on the Columbia were here today, I’m sure they’d say, ‘Let’s figure out what went wrong, fix it and get back up there.’ “
The Outpost, which served as the setting for a bar fight between aging astronauts in the movie Space Cowboys, is from another time.
The building was constructed as a military barracks at nearby Ellington Field during World War II and moved to its now-prime location in 1980. It was an auto-parts store until it was converted into a tavern originally called Fort Terry’s Universal Joint.
In 1981, Gene Ross took over ownership. About that same time, young pilots with crewcuts began looking for out-of-this-world job opportunities on space shuttles. Ross renamed it the Outpost.
Liquid refreshments were offered too, and such basic enticements, along with the darkness and the decidedly nonbureaucratic environment, proved alluring to astronauts, space candidates and star trekkers of every stripe.
It also was where they came to lose their inhibitions and free up their minds to tackle problems from a fresh perspective, Sharon Alden said.
“Who knows what aeronautical problems have been worked out on bar napkins here?” she said. “I know I’ve thrown out many, many of them with mathematical formulas scribbled all over them.”
If the Outpost’s walls could talk, more than a few NASA biographies would need to be amended. But the photographs and memorabilia speak for themselves of a free-flying era that is largely gone today.
The autographed “official” shots of astronauts and shuttle crews are heavily outnumbered by those depicting them in flights of fancy. There are photos of famed astronauts frolicking in Mexican sombreros, Hawaiian shirts, hard hats and Santa caps.
“I still have a lot of old Apollo and Gemini guys who come in on the fourth Thursday of every month, and they spend four to six hours telling old stories and talking about what the young whippersnappers are doing wrong,” said Stan Alden, who took over when Ross died in 1996. “But most of the younger guys are churchgoing family guys who are into fitness and things like that.
“They may come in now and then, but they don’t party like the old guys used to. And as far as I’m concerned, more power to them.”
