I had sort of finished with the Atlantis exibit, but here are a couple of shots of interesting things:
The whole time, this THING is stare'ing at you, like it's alive, sort of creepy but fantastic at the same time!
Here is the cockpit and I tried to dead stick land the thing a couple of times. Very hard with no push and the P-I-O (Pilot Induced Occillation) was the worst thing about it. You're landing very hot at about 250-275 and they want you to flair at 2,000 feet. I got it down once, but I'm sure they had to check the rivets and I left a pile of ceiling tiles on the runway ;-)
They do give you a few things to look at
Piece of cake . . .
This is one of the little engines that push this thing around, in Space. There are 4 of these on the back of the shuttle.
The bottom was left, as is, so you could see the scar'ing from the heat!!! Again, each engine puts out almost a million pounds of thrust, and these are small compaired to the Saturn 5 that combined put out over 160,000,000 pounds of thrust! Imagine the material that is used to withstand 6,000 degrees of heat, under huge pressure!
To get this to space, it required the experts to build an entirely new system, that was re-useable! This is what they came up with:
The big orange thing is the fuel tank. It takes them like 1 1/2 days to fill it and it burns it all up in like 2 minutes! Am I boring you to death yet? The whole place was fantastic!
I found a nice family from Ohio to take the picture:
I then went to the rocket yard and wandered around a bit
Next on my stop was the Astronauts Hall of Fame
And parked out front was this tinker toy:
With Dad in the Space Program and doing many of the tests for the Lunar Module, I thought he would be in this for sure, but couldn't find him anywhere. I guess it's because he didn't get to go to space because of a delay and they wouldn't waive the under 40 years old requirement :-(
But this place has a lot of stuff and people I recognized and mom will know them all when I show her the pictures..
going in . . .
and a few of the guys we lived with at Edwards AFB in CA:
I thought dad might be in the jungle survival shot. The astronauts trained for survival in all sorts of places incase they ejected into this kind of area . . .
Mom knows all about these guys . . .
Dad was around this group or Group 3, I can't remember . . . but no shots of him :-(
Again, this place was very well done and you could spend a day just here alone trying to read all the junk
They showed everything about living in space, even how the go to the bathroom . . . Can you say "suction"? ;-)
This is the actual Hall of Fame. It has all the guys who went to space, so far, and room for more!
I left the KSC very impressed. Good call from Snake, my brother, to visit this place!
I drove north through Jacksonville, a very pretty city
And into the great state of
And right past Savannah, into
Where I spent the night. The sunset was still beautiful!
And, of course, I couldn't finish the ride without a little
Found a cheap hotel (too cheap) and called it a night!
LUKE out!
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