Before I forget...the last night of the cruise Peter was in excruciating pain. He could hardly walk from his injury that had occurred the week before from falling. All of a sudden it had swollen up huge, like orange size huge, and later a massively huge bruise came back. It just flared up and his ankle was so swollen he couldn't rotate it. We went down to medical on the ship because at the very least he needed medicine to help the pain to make it through the night. We got some and hobbled back to bed. Poor guy! It could have been that he was too active on it during the cruise and it was telling him enough already!
So Sunday we said our farewell to the ship and headed out on our last adventure to the Kennedy Space Center. We both absolutely Loved it! I loved that it was a guided tour...I got so much more out of it.
These are rocket ships that have been into space, some are the originals, some are duplicates.
The astronauts! A funny story...these men were asked to come get their photo taken and not forget any of their uniforms...two of the men came in tennis shoes instead of their moon boots so they had to spray paint them silver.
NASA is located in Florida because to launch into space it is the closest to the equator and they use the natural turn of the earth to aid in the launch. The control center is located in Houston Texas (Houston, we have a problem), because the president at the time after Kennedy died was from Texas, so that's where the control center is. This is what it used to look like.
On one of the missions they brought the seed of a tree, set it on the moon for a period of time (days I think) and brought it back to earth to see if it was viable...and this tree grew!
These birdies randomly roamed the space center. NASA is located on a wildlife bird refuge so we kinda got two deals in one...we also saw rare birds, turtles, alligators :)
Atlantis was just retired in the past few years...here we go to see it!
After watching a movie about Atlantis the screen lifts and there it is! It was amazing, and huge! They had to have built the building around it. We spent the next while learning about it and exploring the museum. On it was little individual tiles of a fabric kinda that they pieced on because they were light-weight and anti-flammable.
Shuttles carry people, rockets don't. These are the shuttles that have been into space:
Onto a bus and we headed to see some more things. First off, this building with no windows, and the largest painted flag in the USA. This is where they assemble the shuttles/rockets and them wheel them out onto special gravel all the way to the launch pad.
The garage they come out of:
The gravel road meant to absorb impact and make it a smooth ride to the launch pad.
Launch pad
Next stop was the Apollo/Saturn 5. This was a duplicate made in case it needed to be launched for a rescue mission. However it was never needed so now it is on display. And it is HUGE! Mind boggling! We ate lunch under Apollo.
Touching a rock off the moon
ATV for outer space moon excursions...ya know :)
This landed in the ocean with someone in it from space:
Where all the different landings were on the moon based on where they wanted to collect samples.
No comments:
Post a Comment