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| The shuttle rocket assembly (using Pano on my camera) |
The Kennedy
Space Center Visitors Center is a huge, marvelous and inspiring theme park
devoted to telling the story of the space program, from early days to the
future. It is equal parts recognition of
the incredible historical accomplishments of NASA, science museum, and theme
park.
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| Rocket Garden |
We bought general admission tickets, and started the day
with the tour guide in the Rocket Garden.
The rockets that were displayed gave a good early history of the Space
Race.
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| Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) - reflection is from bus window |
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| Crawler transporter - reflection is from bus window |
From there we hopped on buses and drove into the actual
Space Center.
We drove by the enormous
Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) where rockets are assembled before being taken
to the launch pad.
We drove past 2
Crawlers, enormous transporters that slowly move the assembled rocket to the
launch pad.
Then we drove past a launch
pad.
The bus driver narrated part of the
tour, and videos shown on screens throughout the bus described the rest.
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| Saturn V rocket engines (Stage 1) - used on Apollo missions |
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| Saturn V and Lunar Lander |
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| Apollo 11 insignia - man walked on the moon - took off on Traber's birthday, landed day before Dana's birthday |
We got off at the Apollo/Saturn V Center and learned about
the Apollo program that led to men walking on the moon.
A guide walked us through the stages of the
Saturn Rocket.
There were lots of
interesting exhibits and videos.
After
several hours there, we hopped back on to the bus for the return trip to the
Visitors Center.
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| Atlantis space shuttle - winging through the Atlantis building |
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| Space worn and still amazing Atlantis space shuttle |
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| Atlantis rockets |
Next on the agenda was the Atlantis Space Shuttle building
that had the actual Atlantis shuttle winging its way through the building.
This building had exhibits about the shuttle
program, the Hubble Space
Telescope, and
the International Space Station.
The
exhibits in this building were really geared toward kids as well as adults,
with lots of hands-on things to do, and posted questions challenging different age
groups.
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| Selfie with Atlantis |
We did a quick walk through of the Journey to Mars exhibit,
which shows the current work being done to prepare to travel to Mars. Several places encouraged young people to
join the scientific efforts of NASA when they grow up. We ran out of energy and missed two IMAX
movies, and the Astronaut Memorial. We
did however, visit 3 gift shops…
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| Heat shields from launch pad - reflection from bus window |
Just an hour from Orlando, the Kennedy Space Center seems to
be on the list of activities for families flying to Florida to visit Disney
World. The Kennedy Space Center exhibits are well-designed, informative
and engrossing. Even having lived through all of the history
presented here, we learned a lot. We left
feeling so impressed and proud of the thousands of men and women whose
collective intelligence, hard work and innovation were behind all of these
accomplishments. Probably the only part
that felt theme park-ish about the whole experience was the triumphant music piped
everywhere. OK, the other part that felt
like a theme park was the $31 we spent for lunch. These are two minor dings.
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| Sandhill Cranes!!!!!!! In the parking lot!!!!! |
As we drove out of the parking lot, we noticed 2 large birds
and 2 chicks.
They were Sandhill
Cranes!
We had learned that the Space
Center is the second largest national wildlife refuge in Florida (we imagine
the Everglades is the first), and here were unusual birds that are rarely seen
by those of us who live outside of the few places where they live.
It was a real treat to see them as well.
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| View of the VAB from our campground at sunrise |
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