I went to Space Camp in 1985 and worked with many of the simulators featured in the opening bits at the camp. Yes, the film was a victim of bad timing, but I don't think it is "a new low in tastelessness" by any stretch. In a sense I think of it as something more akin to the last film of the 1980s that show us what NASA wanted to showcase about shuttle, rather than what it became on January 28, 1986. But also the movie had a message of hope in it. When you are a kid growing up with a shuttle launch occurring about once every two months (NASA was trying to get to a flight frequency of a launch a month) you have hope that maybe one day your future will involve perhaps living up there. Challenger sort of killed that dream for me as we became I think a bit too risk averse afterwards and no longer seemed to have the sense of dreaming big anymore or backing up the dreams with funding to make them happen since it is considered too risky and too expensive to do.
Once shuttle retires, I think we are going to look back on it a bit more fondly as we realize there is no craft to replace it. Sure, Americans will continue to go into space on Soyuz and maybe Space X's Dragon will do the job for taking crews to the ISS one day, but we won't have the ultimate utility vehicle for Earth orbit repair work anymore. Plus, astronauts will be coming home on parachutes to land either somewhere in the ocean or on land in remote locations so as not to risk damage to property as opposed to gliding home to land on a runway near civilization. One thing I hear astronauts could do if they had to land at Edwards (due to weather issues at KSC) was grab a bite to eat at the base's Burger King. It may not seem like much, but when you've eaten essentially camping food for the past two weeks, a burger, fries and a soft drink (which you can't drink on orbit since carbonation gives you painful gas bubbles in your weightless stomach) likely tastes REALLY GOOD!
Nice find with the model there. Space Camp to that point I think had some of the best miniature shuttle model work of any film to that point as it looked realistic compared to Moonraker of only 7 years before and Starflight One from 4 years before. IMHO, nobody really managed to surpass that work until Space Cowboys in 2002. Some might say Armageddon got close, but its X-71 shuttles were too advanced and different from normal shuttles to qualify. Granted I regard the launch sequence in Armageddon as cinematic eye candy for a shuttle lover, but still in the final analysis it was digital compositing of the X-71 over a launching shuttle (which funny enough was Atlantis again) since the live shuttle launch was WAY better than anything that the effects houses could do.
One ironic bit is as I understand it, the shuttle flight deck set used in Space Camp got resurrected, rebuilt and modified by Wonderworks for use in Space Cowboys with some modification (such as putting 6 seats on the flight deck, something which didn't come out well in the film edit). It shows that a lot of care was put into that set when it was originally built.
