pkondz
Brace yourself for immediate disintegration
- Joined
- Mar 9, 2007
I downloaded the photos off of Scotty’s camera to get a window into his thoughts as we drove.
Empty?
Scott, ladies and gentlemen. The one and only.
Amazing!
It’s a remote stretch of road beyond the highway, which is important to note since our fuel light was now on, indicating we were on our last gallon of gas.
Uh, oh.
My notes say we reached our destination at 11:15 a.m.
Well it would've been sooner, but having to walk those last few miles eats up a lot of time.
!!!
Oh, boy oh boyohboyohboyohboy!!!!
I might be just a bit of a space geek.
By 1969 it was already hosting over 1 million visitors per year and has been a highly popular tourist attraction ever since.
I was there (first and last time) in 1978.
Things may have changed a bit since I was there.
Those hopes were dashed when we saw the lines at the ticket windows.
Whoo, boy.
This ain't gonna be quick.
my parents jumped in line while I wandered the entrance plaza with Scotty.
That was good of them.
Off to the left, I could see several kiosks marked “Self-Service Ticketing”. Even better, there was hardly anyone there! Hoping we could beat the lines (and the system), we hurried on over to find…not a single screen was working. They were all as dead as Julius Caesar.
This is NASA, right?
I really like that memorial.
He actually tried it, but the website wasn’t working properly.
NASA website too?
There was a food truck by the gate that served hot dogs and “flatbreads” (Come on. Everybody knows they’re pizzas).
Oh, no. You're quite wrong.
A slice of pizza costs $2.
But call it flatbread and now it's $3.50.
See?
He had his third pizza of the trip.
Sounds like my youngest DD.
She had mac n cheese more times than I can count.
As it turned out, all of the KSC’s computers were down,
Good thing you don't use those things for much.
so they had to take everyone’s credit cards by hand individually.
That would explain the massive lineups.
Probably would explain the low crowds too.
I wonder how many people just gave up and left?
So we could put a man on the moon using a computer no more powerful than my pocket calculator, but could not successfully read a credit card.
Actually... A modern toaster is more sophisticated.
It takes a couple of hours and gives visitors a glimpse at the various parts of the property, including the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), launch pads, crawlers and observation posts, as well as a stop at the Saturn V building and exhibit.
It’s one of the largest buildings in North America, although the lack of scale makes it hard to understand its sheer size just by looking at it.
You can get a sense by looking at the car parked out front.
It's that little thing.
The stars on the flag painted on the side of the building are each 6 feet wide.
You could use the stripes as a travel lane for the tour bus we were riding.
Old Yankee Stadium would fit on the roof of this building.
The dark gray doors on the side are some of the largest doors in the world. It would be possible to slide the Statue of Liberty through them easily, without scraping any of the sides.
Did I mentione that I might be a space geek?
I actually knew all that!
In this photo, you can see the control center, housed in the building in front of the VAB. This is where the launch control is headquartered. The windows give them a direct view of the launch pads.
Didn't know that! Cool!
It drives on a huge road made of smooth Tennessee River Rock which is brought in, of course, from Alabama.
Naturally!
When loaded down with cargo, the crawler makes its way to the pad at 1 mile per hour. Once it has offloaded the ship to the pad, it can speed back to the VAB at a top speed of 2 mph.
Yeah... I coud've quoted those speeds for you, too.
Maybe I need to get out more.
I forget how many miles per gallon of gasoline it got, but it was even worse than a Humvee.
Nah. Nothing's that bad!
Here is one of the launch pads.
Recognized that shuttle launch tower right away.
Last time I was here, my son David and I saw the shuttle Endeavour on the pad enclosed in this housing.
Cool. A sight never to be seen again.
Makes me sad.
The curved fence is there to keep both man and animal away from the pad. They had to curve it when they saw alligators actually climbing the fence to get over.
The what, the what???????
Hmmm.... Then again.
"All right gentleman. Congratulations on another successful launch. Now let's go have some BBQ gator."
The water tank holds about 500,000 gallons of water which is all dumped on the pad during a launch. This is not to contain the heat, as you might expect, but rather to help dampen the sound of the launch.
Really! Didn't know that.
It’s hard to contain the heat. Here are some concrete blast shields that have melted under a shuttle launch.
Such a cool picture!
The final stop on the bus tour is the Saturn V building, a museum dedicated to the Apollo missions of the 1960’s and 70’s.
Don't think that building was there in '78.
I remember we drove past the Saturn V.... which was lying on its side... outside in the open air.
And it’s pretty cool.
No kidding!!
From there, you are led into the main hall, where an actual Saturn V rocket awaits your discovery.
it’s the largest rocket NASA ever built.
Yep.
But I can use Scotty to demonstrate the scale.
Might not want to stand there when you light it, though.
Man, I love that shot.
Here’s a moon landing craft. No matter how many times I see it, it always amazes me that we landed on the moon with something that looks like an Erector set wrapped in tin foil.
It just looks so..... flimsy, right?
And I bet most people don't realize two things.
Only half of it leaves the moon. The lower descent stage stays behind.
The ascent stage crashes back on the moon.
With two exceptions.
Everyone knows the Apollo 13 story. Well, everyone who's seen the movie.
That ascent stage burned up on reentry into Earth's atmosphere.
But the coolest one?
The ascent stage for Apollo 10. The one before the first moon landing.
It's still in space.
It was jettisoned into a solar orbit and it's still out there... somewhere.
I find it fascinating that a space craft that held people in it and orbited the moon... is still traveling through space.
The other main exhibit housed in this building is a show dedicated to the Apollo 11 mission, first to land on the moon. It’s another entertaining show, one that makes me proud of my country.
You should! It was an amazing accomplishment!
We checked out the Apollo exhibits which included this capsule, nicely toasted after a re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere.
I looked it up. Apollo 14.
Hard to believe that’s all that is left after leaving the earth on the massive rocket in the other room.
Considering the size of the Saturn... Yes!
“You know we're sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder. Makes you feel good, doesn't it?”
Great line!
Of course, the Apollo astronauts didn’t have a nuclear weapon, but with all that rocket fuel underneath them, would it have mattered?
Not to them.
There’s one spot where you are allowed to touch an actual moon rock.
Cool.
Turn away now if you don’t want me to reveal that it actually feels like…
…a rock.
Ah... but it's what it represents, isn't it?
The folks there seem a little perturbed when funding is discussed. They like to point out that NASA is the only part of the government that actually turns a profit, due to the patents and scientific advances they’ve created.
Interesting.
I enjoy seeing what NASA has accomplished and imagining what it must have been like to have been a part of those groundbreaking achievements.
I have a book that's all about the Mercury program (preceded the Apollo one. See the movie The Right Stuff.) from the engineers viewpoint.
Fascinating stuff.
Well, to me it was.
Try this on for size and compare it to the crawler picture you showed us.
It's a Mercury capsule (the first one, I think) being transported on a flatbed truck.... on a couple of freaking mattresses!
It’s hard to look at what has been accomplished and not wonder to yourself—why don’t we still try to do things like that?
Those days are gone. And I don't know if it's better or worse.