From what we know about Vice President Mike Pence, he’s not much of a risk-taker. More like a Boy Scout rule-follower to his absolute detriment, to the point where he’s afraid to be alone in a room with a woman that he’s not married to, and finds the Disney movie Mulan a bit too edgy.
So it was a shock to NASA, and the world, when on a visit to the Kennedy Space Center, Rebel Pence emerged. In flagrant disregard of what looks to be a message printed on a piece of white paper attached by a piece of yellow tape, the vice president clearly touched, with his unsullied hand, a piece of vague but certainly “Critical Space Flight Hardware” marked with a “DO NOT TOUCH” sign, confusingly in quotes.
A NASA source told The Verge that “‘it looks like the vice president is touching the forward bay cover of the Orion capsule, which is exactly what it sounds like: the thing that goes over the forward bay’… Our source says the sign was probably there to minimize handling of the hardware. ‘A quick cleaning of the surface and all is okay,’ he says.”
That is an enormous relief, but our main takeaway from this now-global incident is that NASA needs much better signage.
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