Word quickly spread through the NASA community. What she had not anticipated was the reaction at the meeting that night. The thought of closing distressed her, but building a new grill meant pouring at least $10,000 into a place already losing money. Years ago, she substituted as an Outpost waitress when her daughter had pneumonia she never left. ''I told them we were going to close it down on Oct. So in late September the Adens convened a meeting of regulars to deliver a blunt message. But competition from newer bars and restaurants had cut into business, and the loss of the lunch crowd was seemingly a fatal blow. They bought the place four years ago from the estate of its fabled proprietor, Gene Ross, with the modest business plan of keeping it going for the faithful and breaking even at the cash register. No grill meant no lunch crowd, which meant more debts for the bar's owners, Stan and Sharon Aden. The building is constructed partly from a wooden World War II barracks, and the marshal determined that the outdated grill on which thousands of Outpost burgers had been cooked was a fire hazard. ''It's like a second home for a lot of people,'' said Larry Keyser, who served as assistant flight director on Apollo 13, as he sipped a tap beer from a mug commemorating a space shuttle mission.įor a space program dependent on cutting-edge technology, the Outpost is a decidedly low-tech watering hole, so much so that the local fire marshal recently came close to shutting the place down.
Many of the people who come to nurse beers and trade gossip are the engineers, technicians and private contractors who help send people into space. The walls are lined with photographs of smiling, blue-suited astronauts, not sports stars. Every neighborhood bar has regulars, but the Outpost's neighborhood is NASA and the nearby Johnson Space Center. Outside, there is a faint smell of sewage.īut push inside through the swinging doors shaped like two bikini-clad women and sentiment clearly rules the day. A tangle of bushes growing up an outside wall seems ready to swallow the place. The old red building is practically falling down. For anyone unmoved by sentiment, the Outpost Tavern might not seem worth saving.
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