10-January-2024 Kennedy Space Center

After my day at Kennedy Space Center I've decided I really want to be an astronaut!

The excitement began when I was at an intersection waiting to turn right into Kennedy Space Center. I was about 5 cars back and when the light turned green no one moved forward. A police car had just arrived and I thought there might be a minor accident. The traffic light cycled many times and still we made no forward progress. After about 15 minutes there was a huge traffic jam building behind me .... and that's when I saw the reason for the delay: The center section of a rocket fuel booster was entering the intersection and being transported down the road. I jumped out of my car and ran up to the intersection to watch NASA in action. Super exciting!!!! Once the Blue Origin rocket booster had cleared the intersection we were able to proceeded into the visitor center .... and the day just kept getting better.

I saw and learned so much it's hard to distill it all into a few paragraphs. I began by taking a special tour that goes out to the barrier island where all the launch pads are. We went to the infamous Launch Pad 39B where most of the Apollo missions began. Amazing.

Then we went to the enormous Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB). The building looks like a giant cube but unless you get up close you have no feel for the enormity of this place. A display out front painted a small portion of the flag that is on the top left corner of the building on the pavement so that you could see just how big it is. Each star is 6 feet tall and the stripes are all 10 feet wide. Our guide said the roof is so big that you could fit a major league baseball stadium on top and still have an extra acre left over for parking. WOW!

The bus tour ended at the Apollo Mission Center. They give a great movie presentation about all the Apollo missions and then you are released into a giant room where one of the Apollo rockets hangs above you on the ceiling. So cool to be up close and to learn lots of the behind-the-scenes stuff that goes on. And crazy to think they got humans to the moon in the late 1960s with the technology they had back then.

Then I returned to the main part of the Kennedy Space Center campus and went to what I found to be the most incredible exhibit: the Atlantis space shuttle center. In the 1970s NASA started designing Atlantis which would be the reusable craft necessary to transport people and equipment to space to make, supply and repair the international space station.

Everything about Atlantis was so awe inspiring. I had fun because I got to sit in the mock capsule as commander. Sadly I think that's the closest I'm going to get to being an astronaut!