Cape Canaveral - Jan 21-23

It took only a few hours to make the drive down from Jacksonville to Titusville where we stayed for three nights.  The campground we chose was an RV golf resort where retired folks have the opportunity to buy sites to park their RVs for the winter, or I suppose, year round. It was a huge community with several developments, including some custom home sites, wrapped around an 18 hole golf course. The place had two restaurants, a church, a hobby building and a sports center.  People got around in golf carts, kind of reminded me of Long Beach back when I was young and all the retirees from Iowa drove around downtown in their electric carts. The place was very impressive with lots of activities and events.

We focused on touring the Kennedy Space Center and then took an afternoon to drive through Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge and Cape Canaveral National Seashore.

The Space Center is a paradise for space geeks (Russ and I are probably charter members.) Highlights for me included the Rocket Park where rockets from the beginning of the space race up through the Saturn V which was used in the Apollo missions were on display; the Saturn building which housed an entire Saturn V rocket; and the Atlantis building which housed the Atlantis space shuttle. We have now seen three of the four space shuttles (Atlantis here in Cape Canaveral, Endeavour in Los Angeles and Discovery in Chantilly, Virginia). Now we need to schedule a trip to New York to visit the Enterprise.

I especially enjoyed the Atlantis display.  You entered the building going past a space shuttle stack of a real extra fuel tank and the two booster rockets. They are huge and so recognizable. You see a video where you got an introduction to the space shuttle program and the role Atlantis played. Then the screen comes up and there the shuttle is, positioned as if it were in space with the bay doors open and the boom deployed.

You can walk all around the shuttle and see the top, bottom and sides from all sorts of angles.  There were lots of displays featuring the space shuttle program.

The Saturn V building was very impressive also.  An actual Saturn V was placed horizontally in the building and separated into its stages so you could see just what parts separated as the rocket pushed the Apollo spacecraft into space.

The regular admission included a two hour bus tour of the facility. This took us out to the Vehicle Assembly Building where the rockets and payloads are integrated and prepared for launch, two of the launch pads and along the road that the mobile launch pad travels. Along the way, we saw some wildlife including alligators and bald eagles.

We took a special tour out to the Launch Control Center and saw the room where the last 15 shuttle launches were managed.  Then we headed out to the Astronaut Hall of Fame which is about six miles from the visitor center.  We thought we might spend an hour there, but the timeline they presented was so interesting, we spent almost three hours there.  The timeline covered my lifespan from early teens to the present; they did a good job of integrating key cultural and political events with space program events.  It was very nostalgic for me.

We didn’t start our tour of the Wildlife Refuge and the National Seashore until late afternoon but we did see a few new creatures including an armadillo and some black vultures. The National Seashore was totally empty, not another human in sight.  It was the first time I’ve seen empty seashore.

Although the weather was blustery and threatened rain, we were saved from it during the day. Treated to a thunderstorm on one of the nights.  Sure hoping we start seeing warmer weather.



Entrance to Kennedy Space Center Visitor Park.



Kennedy's vision played a prominent role in exhibits on the beginning and future of the space program.

It was tight quarters in those early spaceships. This is a replica of a Gemini ship.

A beautiful mural of the International Space Station.

A replica of the Sputnik. I remember going out into the backyard at night and looking for it. The paper published the schedule for its orbits. Saw it several times.

Who can forget Robby the Robot?

The Vehicle Assembly Building. This is where the rockets were integrated to the spacecrafts.

 

On the tour, we saw a bunch of wildlife, including these two alligators.

 

This is the mobile launch pad. The rocket is connected to this to make its trip to the launchpad.

This is the crawler for the whole launch assembly.  It was massive and could move only 1 mile an hour loaded.  It took many hours to get the rocket from the Vehicle Assembly Building out to the launchpad.

Each of the individual treads weighed 1 ton.

This is the road the crawler traveled on. In the distance, you can see one of the launchpads.

This is the infrastructure that connected to the rocket and launch equipment.  This included the equipment that got the astronauts up to their seats.

The Saturn V building held a real Saturn V. I was always fascinated by how these things shook during launch.  They are massive!



Another set of rockets on the second state.  Not as huge, but still impressively large.

An actual Apollo capsule.



The rocket is over 300 feet long.

I remembered seeing this on TV when the astronauts were carried out to their spacecraft.

Remember Snoopy as the Apollo mascot?



Remember the movie, Apollo 13? This tiny little space was how the 3 astronauts moved into the lunar lander so they could survive getting home.

 

We got to touch an actual moon rock!

 

An actual space suit that was used on the moon.  It is filthy from moon dust.  The dust was very abrasive (there was no wind or water to rub the dust smooth) and could not be brushed off.

 

An actual fuel tank paired with models of the two rockets that were used to launch the space shuttles.

As you entered the Atlantis exhibit, you saw a dramatic posing of the shuttle as it looked in space during a spacewalk.

The underside of the shuttle. These tiles are what protected the ship during re-entry.



A space walk suit.  Much evolved from the early ones.



 

A pretty cute way to demonstrate the curvature of the path a shuttle took to land.

This is one of the launch control rooms in the Vehicle Launch Center. It is being redone for the new space missions that are being planned, including possibly landing a man on the moon within the next 10 years.

These are the procedures that were used for some of the shuttle launches.

Original equipment used during the past 15 shuttle missions.

 

We had a great time at the Kennedy Space Center.

 

 

The Hall of Fame had some nice exhibits, especially a timeline of the space program.

There are a lot of astronauts who had been in the Scouting program. Not all Eagles, though.

Many of early astronauts were naval aviators. These were helmets they used during their flying careers.

Aspiring for Mars!

One of the local birds, a Florida black vulture.

 

This armadillo almost became road kill. We were able to stop in time and watch it dither about whether it was going to finish crossing the road.  Eventually it thought better of it.

It was a chilly and windy day at the seashore.

 

 



Church at the RV & Golf Resort where we stayed.