Space Center Houston

We woke at 8 a.m., a nice sleep in; to fog and 64 degrees and humid. We spent the day at Space Center Houston and it was very amazing. The Starship Gallery relives the triumphs of America's manned space flights and displays many of those artifacts. You see spacesuits, a glove, the nosecones, videos from Astronauts, walk through a space capsule, see the seats where the Astronauts are strapped in for liftoff, and everything you can imagine. There is also the world's largest display of moon rocks which I'm touching.

There were many interactive things to do. We stepped on scales and I found that I weighed 54 lbs on the moon. You could sit in a simulator and try to dock on the moon. Ron's in the space capsule with an 'astronaut' somersaulting in 0 gravity behind him. The moon buggy is displayed. There's a nose cone where they are strapped in to thrust off and space suits in the background.

We went on the NASA Tour, which first took us to the Mission Control Center that was used on the Gemini and Apollo Missions in the late 60's and 70's. We sat in the gallery where the families sat during takeoff. It had little metal containers with lids on the back of the seats in front of you - ashtrays. This is where Celebrities and Presidents have sat when they came to see it. The computer at that time was the size of 3 Greyhound buses and their 'email' system was a pneumatic tube that would print something needed and zip it up to the Control Center. It was state of the art stuff in the 60's. Our cell phones today have more RAM than this computer did at that time.

Next we visited the Astronaut Training Facility and several Astronaut are training there now, although we didn't see anyone outside of the crafts. They are launching a Shuttle Feb. 22. It is huge and they had all of the pieces of the spaceships so the astronauts practiced everything from dressing in their gear to getting strapped in for liftoff or doing the duties in the floating space. The Canadarm was attached as you can see in the background and they mentioned that this was from Canada where the Astronauts go to train on it. They also train in their suits in a huge water pool in a different location because you can't achieve 0 gravity on earth so they learn in water what it feels like. The Saturn V Facility was next, being preserved in a building. It is over 385' long, higher than the Statue of Liberty. Very interesting day.