Turns out a good Maryland friend, Sarah, is down here in Cocoa Beach for six weeks for work. She's away from her family, SO lonely... of course it's a humanitarian effort on my part to go and stay with her at her awesome three bedroom condo right on the beach... :)
Seriously though, Sarah was really awesome to let us come stay with her. Friday morning she had to go to work, so we slept late and completely lazed around, as evidenced by this picture of me sitting on the balcony in my pajamas.
There's the beach, right beyond the dunes. We were so close that apparently, at night, no one is allowed to turn on their outside balcony lights because it might disturb the sea turtles that come up out of the water to lay their eggs in the sand. Yay for sea turtles, but also it was really nice having it be so dark and peaceful at night.
Dan and I drove around for a bit (with the top up, because the weather alternated between blazing sun and drizzle) and then after lunch we met up with Sarah at the Kennedy Space Center!
I think the sign looks so retro.
Beyond the entrance here you can see the rocket garden. They are building a whole new addition to house the Space Shuttle Atlantis.
There are a lot more things to do at the KSC Visitor's Center than I expected. Since we were there only half a day, we didn't nearly get through everything. We didn't get to any of the IMAX movies or in to see the rocket garden, or to the Astronaut Hall of Fame.
I think probably the main attraction, though is the bus tour of the Space Center. Not only did we get to spend some time on a nice air-conditioned non-humid bus... ahhh... but it took us to several different stops and along the way we also saw all kinds of wildlife -- alligators, a manatee, lots of cool birds, and a huge bald eagle's nest. The nest was so large, the guide said, that a king-size bed could fit in it.
Here's Dan and Sarah goofing off waiting for the bus. The great thing about going on this tour with Sarah, besides the fact that she's just a lot of fun, is that she is an actual rocket scientist. In fact the reason she is down in Florida right now is that she is working on a spacecraft that is going to be launched later this year. So Sarah is just a wealth of extra information.
This is one of the three main engines that power the Space Shuttle. This very engine flew on 15 missions.
Here's the business end of the engine. Sarah explained to us how the fuel comes through the engine and the size and shape of the nozzle creates the thrust. It was fascinating, and Sarah is so animated as she talks, since she truly loves this stuff, that we noticed other people around us stopping to listen in.
This is launch pad 39-A! It was originally built for the Apollo program, but was modified to be used by the space shuttles.
Obviously I'm pretty excited about seeing the launch pad, even though there will never be another shuttle launch there.
This picture looks like we were being posed by the Sears Photographer. I don't know what's up with my hand laying so daintily on Dan's shoulder.
Look, there it is! Right there!!
Also behind us you can see the roads that the crawler used to transport the shuttles out to the launch pads, at a blazing speed of about half a mile per hour. The crawlers were too heavy to go on the asphalt road so they traveled on a separate road made of small hard stones. They got an awesome gas mileage of about 42 feet per gallon.
Now we go backwards a bit in time and relive the Space Race, where America went basically from kids playing with toys to putting a man on the moon, in a decade. Funny what a little good old-fashioned unfriendly competition with another superpower can push you to accomplish! Here's me and Sarah with a picture of the Saturn V rocket that powered the Apollo missions.
Now this was really cool. We sat in a room with the actual consoles used in the launch control center for the Apollo missions, and there was a simulation of launch. It's amazing to think they accomplished all this in the 60s with what we now consider to be such ancient technology.
This is the van that carried the astronauts out to the launch pad.
And here is the actual Saturn V rocket. It lays horizontally in this huge warehouse. The scale of the thing is just amazing -- especially when you realize that the actual astronaut capsule is so small. All of this power was necessary just to get the spacecraft up away from the earth. Very very cool.
We got to ride on the shuttle simulator, which was a lot of fun. Then we tooled around the gift shop for a while before heading out. On the way back to the condo we stopped at a seafood restaurant in Port Canaveral. I'm not really a seafood person, and I wanted to order some chicken or a burger or something, but I felt like since I was at a seafood restaurant I'd give their fish of the day a try. It was really yummy -- grilled mahi. Now, back home I always hear it referred to as "mahi mahi", but down here it was just called "mahi". ????
So all in all it was a great day in Cocoa Beach, and we were really hoping the next day would be sunny so we could go swimming and cruise around with the top down...
(P.S. My camera battery died (because I hadn't charged it in weeks) halfway through the day so a lot of these pictures are Sarah's. Thank you!! Sarah writes about her work, her kids, and whatever else she feels like writing about, at e-manadventures.blogspot.com )
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