– photographs and messages from inside the Sausurrean Bar –

Posts Tagged: rockets


Posts Tagged ‘rockets’

Thursday, March 22nd, 2012

Titusville, FL

 

Apollo 8 mission control

So, today was day 1 at the Kennedy Space Center – I went on the first of the two specific tours they offer – “Cape Canaveral, then and now,” and we got to see a lot of the old launching pads for unmanned Air Force and NASA rockets, as well as for Gemini, Mercury and Apollo missions, as well as some of the command centers for the specific missions and programmes. After the specific tour there was time to do some more looking around (I’ve seen far less than 50% of the center so far, eek), and saw another Saturn V rocket, among other things. (More photos, as always, are in the USA 2012 photo album.)

Cape Canaveral

Went to Cape Canaveral itself after the KSC closed at 6pm, and shall head back to the KSC tomorrow early morning right for the moment they open. Will I need three days there? Who knows! Come back here to find out :-).

Sunday, March 11th, 2012

Huntsville, AL

shuttle mock-up behind trees in parking lot

What do you mean, no oversize parking?

Hello from Huntsville, Alabama! I made it to the US yesterday save and more or less sound (of the 10 hour flight, 7+ featured ‘fasten seatbelt’ signs and some pretty rough spots of turbulence, bleargh), and headed out this morning Alabama bound. Spent the day making my way to Scottsboro via country lanes, and from there to Huntsville. In Scottsboro I went to the Unclaimed Baggage Center, where you can basically buy everything that comes out of airline luggage left unclaimed after 90 days. In the guidebook the idea sounded kind of interesting, but in reality it turned out both more boring (they need to wipe all photos from memory cards and cameras before selling them etc) and more sad (an abandoned “Happy birthday mom!” present etc) than it was made to sound in the writeup. So I mostly felt sorry for the people who were missing their luggage – the place somehow was bad karma central. Didn’t buy anything, nor stay very long.

Onwards to Huntsville it was, where I went straight to the Space & Rocket Center and basically stayed there until they threw everyone out. Saturn V rockets are really tall (yes, something one knows in the abstract, but walking along one makes it a lot more concrete – its like flying to space on top of a skyscraper)! Their non-permanent exhibit right now is on Wernher von Braun and his life and times (“I’m learning Chinese now!”), and the two movies on at the IMAX theatre are Hubble (awesome! watch it!) and Space Junk (bad! avoid!). I didn’t get to read all the details about the development of the Saturn V (see ‘until they threw everyone out’) and spent too much money in the gift shop bying all the special collection issues of newspaper articles dealing with the Apollo program, space exploration etc. It felt a bit like cheating, given how painstakingly I went through newspapers on microfilm last year in the British Newspaper Library for my Apollo 13 – Earth Day and Space Day paper, and I have no idea what is actually inside those collections, since they were all shrink wrapped and I’ve not opened one yet (they will travel better in their shrink wrapped condition). We’ll see. I might also have bought Space Shuttle earrings, so it wasn’t all money spent on future work, though.

And, you lot, Space Camp is here in Huntsville! Who knew? (Lots of people, probably, but not I.) I hadn’t thought of the Space Camp movie in ages (before seeing the sign for the actual camp today), but I loved it when I was in my early teens. (“Max und Jinx! Freun-de für im-mer!”)

I’ve also made a photo album that I will be posting my trip photos into, you can find it right here (some of the photos that show up in there might also turn up as individual photo posts at a later date, though).