Change is inevitable and the more you travel, the more you see it. When you're in your hometown, things change, but at a slower pace because you get to watch them as they change and it seems slower. Buildings rise and fall. Highways or rail line are built or torn down. You watch it happen. But when you revisit somewhere after 25 or 7 years, you immediately see change.
A New Moon Sunrise at Satellite Beach.
Today we spent the day at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. I was last here for a Xerox convention in Orlando in 87 or so with Lori Tagg and her friend Lynn. I remember it was pretty soon after the Challenger disaster in 86 and no shuttles were being lauched as NASA tried to figure out what had happened and how to fix it for the safety of the other shuttles and crews.
At the time of that visit, there were mockups of some of the boosters and the Gemini and Apollo capsules, a gift shop and a small museum with artifacts and exhibits.
Presenting the new KSCWorld. With 3D movies, Astronaut Meet and Greets, Angry Birds in Space and tours to the launchpads and beyond. All at a cost. $10 to park and a minimum of $50 entrance fee. Still cheaper than Disney World.
The IMAX 3D presentation about the Hubble Telescope was terrific. Not only for the 3D but for the computer animation of Hubble Deep Space Photography. It almost makes you feel as though you are travelling those thousand and million light years to the galaxies that they highlight.
Next up was the Atlantis Shuttle display. These are the Booster rockets and the Fuel Cell.
The Shuttle Atlantis. 35 missions and a million or so miles around the world.
They let Kathy drive and you can see what kind of parking job she did! (She was too busy looking at For Sale signs.) Hey! Before you go off on me about sexist comments, HAVE YOU DRIVEN WITH HER? We're talking Rain Woman here!
We also took a tour of the Saturn Vehicle Assembly building. The tour took you past the Shuttle assembly building which is the sixth largest building in the world by volume. The stripes on the flag are wide enough to drive a bus on and each star is 6 feet across.
One of the shuttle launch towers. The oblong shape on the left is where they assemble the shuttle payloads and that whole side of the toward swings inward to envelope the shuttle for flight preparation.
NASA left out a crawler that they are using to test the improvements to the road way that was build to carry the shuttles to their launch pads. It was built to hold 25 million pounds of weight, 100 feet wide it is a seven foot layer of bed rock covered by a layer of asphalt and then covered with 18 inches of river rock all over a swamp for 4 miles.This was in the sixties folks. Designed with slide rulers and carbon paper.
Here's good article I found on the work currenting being done and on the history of the road: http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2013/01/ksc-crawlerway-facelift-preparation-sls/
The actual Saturn was way too big to get into one photo (it's still the largest and most powerful rocket ever built).If you, like me, were watching back in 1967 as Apollo 8 took off to circle the moon, you saw pictures of the control room as the countdown to blast off proceeded. This is the actually control center.
The lunar control module that Apollo 8 used in their voyage
Their museum of treasures, complete with faux vault door, had a great display of prototype space suits, astronaut memorabilia moon rocks. You could actually touch a piece of the moon. What did it feel like. Smooth. From the 50 million people who touched it before you.
And finally on the way back to the main pavilions, NASA brought out one of their alligator replicas for everyone to see.
That's it from here. 77 yesterday. 79 today in advance of the cold front that's terrorizing the South. Supposedly there will be snow as far south as Gainesville. Fort Walton Beach, where we were just two weeks ago, is expecting 3 inches of the foreign material tonight. Should be interesting to watch the traffic reports in the AM.
This was a fun day for me. It got me thinking about all the times as a kid that my friends and I played Flash Gordon and Space Explorers (before Wii and Xbox). Way before space flight had even happened.
It brought back some memories of the two times I'd been to Orlando and how it's changed here on the Space Coast..
Once I flew back on a red-eye to Chicago and spent the night in the airport just to catch a early standby flight back to Denver for my friend Jennifer Wing's wedding.
Hadn't thought about Lori or Jan Hansen who I attended conferences here with in ages.
A good day.
Off to the beach. Stay warm y'all.
An early Good night and good luck.
No comments:
Post a Comment