Dave’s Midlife Blog

Day #2 of our Florida trip was devoted to driving to the Kennedy Space Center. The Washington Nationals, our real reason for being here on the coast of central Florida, were playing the Baltimore Orioles in Ft. Lauderdale. (They lost the game 8-2.) Ft. Lauderdale is many hours down the coast from here, just north of Miami, and so we decided to skip that game. When I looked at a map of the Grapefruit League teams, I noticed that Ft. Lauderdale is the spring training location farthest removed from any of the others.

Instead, we got up relatively early for being on vacation, and prepared to drive up the coast.

Incidentally, we have nothing to complain about with regard to our hotel. We wake to sunrise views like this one. I took this picture out our window this morning. The Atlantic Ocean provides the white noise to which we sleep.

The drive to Kennedy Space Center takes about 45 minutes from Melbourne Beach. You drive up state highway A1A (known to me for being the title to a Jimmy Buffett album back in the 1970s), through Patrick Air Force Base and Cocoa Beach (where we actually saw I Dream of Jeannie Way) up to Port Canaveral. Then you have to drive back inland, over the Indian River, and enter the center from the west. It was a much longer drive than we expected, but not bad at all.

The KSC is located on Merritt Island, which is a huge wildlife preserve. That was another surprise to me. I’m not sure what I expected, but I didn’t expect this quasi-military base to be in the middle of a wildlife refuge. You drive for miles and miles and eventually come to the visitors’ center. The visitors’ center is somewhat like a theme park with free parking.

When we went in, we immediately saw an IMAX movie about the space station, and then we prowled around the visitors’ center area. Our big organizing event of the day was the bus tour throughout the space center, but on the way to the bus, we saw this interesting stone-and-water sculpture of the heavens in global form. Barbara has the universe in her hands here.

For a couple of Baby Boomers who lived through the Space Age as children and teenagers, this visit to the Kennedy Space Center was fascinating–and at times very emotional. The first stop on the bus tour was to a place called LC39, where there was an observation gantry. It took awhile for us to understand that this was the site of the launch pad for the Apollo missions to the moon. The view was great–but even greater was standing on the very spot where these trips to the moon began.

Next to the road on which we drove is the crawlway. This is a road that looks like two gravel roads with a grassy median. In fact, this road is designed to carry the space vehicles from the Vehicle Assembly Building

to the launch sites. The crawler is a huge platform with eight tracks, like those of military tanks, that slowly “crawl” the assembled vehicles to the launch sites. Here you can see a crawlway that leads out to LC39B, one of the two sites from which the space shuttles are launched. You can see the superstructure of LC39B in the background. It’s several miles away. This is as close as “normal” people are allowed to get.

The bus drove us from the LC39 observation gantry to the Apollo/Saturn V center. We saw a short movie about the three-man Apollo missions, then we went into a control room. We gasped in excitement when we were told that this room was not a mockup, but instead the actual control center for the flight to the moon.

A film showed us the moon landing, including shots of the control guys who were in this very room sweating bullets as the Lunar Module landed on the moon’s surface. And while the film was running on the screens, the various relevant seats and control stations were illuminated, and the various stages of progress were indicated on a big board to the side. For me the most intense moment was at the end of the countdown, when the rockets fired but before the vehicled had lifted off the launch pad. The indicator light for that moment said “COMMIT.” Yes, I guess that was truly a moment of commitment. Whew!

The Saturn V rocket was a huge thing. Here’s a picture of me standing beside it in the exhibition hall.

By the time we got to the International Space Station Center, we were tired and a bit overwhelmed. The Space Station is a fantastic thing: an international science laboratory permanently installed in space. It represents the efforts of many different countries to use zero-gravity for scientific experiments. Even the Russians–our arch-rivals, the fear of whom drove the space race in the 1960s–are active participants.

But there is much less of a “whiz-bang” effect with the space station. The station itself does not look like something from Star Trek, but rather like a military base in space. When I say that, I mean the architecture is that blah, bland, purely functional look of squareness and sheet metal one sees on any military base. And the science that is conducted there is way above our heads, we poor little German teacher and arts administrator couple.

Nevertheless, we remain huge fans of the space program. We found our way to the KSC with a GPS system in my BlackBerry, and we drove in a Toyota Prius. These are technologies that would not have existed without the space race.

One final curiosity: we have never seen and heard so many Germans in any American tourist attraction as we saw yesterday. We expect to hear a lot of Spanish in the U.S., but only occasionally German. Yet we were surrounded by Germans everywhere we turned–both families with small kids and older folks.

At first we understood this to be a reflection of the fact that the U.S. space program was mostly created by Germans in the 1950s and 1960s, led by Wernher von Braun, who had helped the Nazis with the V-1 rocket. Germans were essential to the development of space travel, and I’m sure this is a point of pride for Germans of our generation.

But later on, at dinner, we realized that this is also a very cheap vacation for Europeans. The Euro is currently worth over $1.50 U.S., so European tourists are probably going to be all over the major American tourist attractions this year. We, however, who are traveling to Europe this summer, will not be buying many souvenirs there.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 9:28 am and is filed under travel, family, florida. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.