Cocoa Beach to West Palm Beach
Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), 4th most voluminous building the world, where shuttles are mated with solid rocket boosters
Bus tour
Shuttle engine - I think it's a 4 cylinder
Description of what you can see of launch pad from tour viewing platform
Path that the Crawler uses to transport the shuttle from the VAB to the launch pad. The 3.5 mile trip takes 5 hours at a speed of 2 mph. 
The launch pad in the background from the viewing platform. Our camera zoomed in pretty good in the launch pad shot a few pictures above.
Cut away of VAB and shuttle being assembled
Tour bus
Saturn 5 Rocket Exhaust
It's big!
Enjoying the tour
Bay side restaurant
Mmmm!
Tuesday June 2, 2009
One nice thing about the Kennedy Space Center is that there is a nice big free parkling lot. The problem with that, as we found, is that anyone can get into the parking lot. We were walking in from the parking lot when we noticed a number of security guards around 3 different cars that had been broken into. We went back to our car and loaded all our electronics into our backpack, which made it very heavy. It also meant more hassle getting through security. When we went back to our car at the end of the day, we were irritated that the security guards were trying to tell the people whose cars had been broken into that the heat can sometimes cause the windows to shatter.
We've been to the Kennedy Space Center before and always love the IMAX films. The sights along with the sounds send chills down your spine. When they show the shuttle taking off the whole theater shakes and it feels like you're standing right next to the launch pad. We did the bus tour this time. It was OK and you get to see some different things, but you can't really get very close to anything. There were plenty of old space stuff to see and things to learn about to make it fun, but we were disappointed that there was no big kids activity center like there was at Johnson Space Center in Houston.
There was a buzz around the Space Center because the space shuttle was supposed to be landing that day. At first we were a little confused because we remembered one of the bus drivers at Disney telling us the week before that the shuttle had just landed. We figured out that the shuttle had landed the previous week in California because of bad weather and was being flown back to Florida by the shuttle carrier aircraft today. As we were leaving the parking lot we noticed several gatherings of people gazing into the sky looking for the shuttle. We contemplated hanging around, but weren't sure exactly when it would be landing or what you could really see - so we hit the road.
We were back on US-1 heading south along the coast. We had been driving about 20 minutes and I was chatting with Helen when something out of my driver's side window caught my eye. I turned and yelled out, "It's right there!" Sure enough, the big 747 with the shuttle on it's back was flying along side us down the coast line. They said at the Space Center that the shuttle carrier does a tour down the coast line so the tax payers can see what they're spending all their money on. I scrambled to pull the camera out of my pocket, but didn't get a good shot. We were all shocked by our good fortune and kept talking about it for a while.
We stopped by a water side restaurant with a tiki hut theme for dinner. There was music and a good crowd. The crowd seemed mature and looking for a nice relaxing dinner overlooking the water just like us, but the wait staff were head banger tatoo guys and they had metal music playing so loud that you could barely talk. It was a very obvious case of the music being played for the workers and not for the guests. We finally asked our waiter to turn the music down...way down. Everyone (but the waiters) seemed to appreciate the change. The food was good and we had a nice time. We were worried about being bothersome tourists, but decided to go ahead and ask a couple of the workers if they had seen the shuttle fly by. To our surprise, they responded enthusiastically that they had indeed seen it and that it had flown right by the restaurant. They pointed to bridge and said that the shuttle had turned there and flown back up the coast.
We made our way south past Melbourne, Vero Beach, and into Palm Beach. It was a beautiful drive as the sun was setting. The real estate was getting much more expensive! There were so many multimillion dollar mediterraean looking villas on the water with beautiful landscaping and huge boats parked alongside. Very impressive!
We spent the night in West Palm Beach at a La Quinta Inn. It looked decent from the outside, but the door on every room had a chunk of wood missing like they had been pried open at some point. We were even more disappointed the next morning when we went down for breakfast to find we had just missed it. It ended at 9:00 instead of 10:00 like most hotels.
No comments:
Post a Comment