Day 2, early start, well more just generally up early as I’m on the sofa bed in the living room and my uncle gets up for work at 5… Wakey Wakey.

Decided that today was the day to head over to the Kennedy Space Centre (Aka, NASA HQ), so those retards who guessed Disneyland yesterday were wrong.

Took a couple hours to drive over there, partly due to me programming the sat nav wrong and partly not having a map. KSC is located next door to Cape Canaveral, so you would rightly assume that Cape Canaveral Tours and Info would be a sensible place to head if KSC didn’t show on sat nav. Well no, we ended up at the University of Florida. Only a slight detour.

Security at KSC was kinda stupid, first you take all metals out of your pocket and put them into a bowl, go through metal detector then over to have your belongings inspected. First time round I got sent back to the car for carrying a sat nav (apparently extremely dangerous and not allowed on site). Second time round I didn’t bother taking most of the metal out of my pocket, aka the car keys which I totally forgot about. Walked straight through, how secure!

Lots to do, relatively little time. Around the corner from the entrance was the Rocket Garden. An area which showed the evolution of the rocket from being unmanned to manned.

Big rocket, little did I know, this would soon turn out to be small rocket.

After wandering around the Rocket Garden we decided to grab a bite of lunch and head out on the tour. Basically a bus trip between multiple sites where you jump off and look around. First stop is the LC-39 Observation Gantry, a spot, not too far from the launch pad with a rather awesome view of the area.

The viewing platform itself:

Then the view, looking over to launchpad B, you can also see the Crawler track.

And here’s a Crawler, the thing which travels at upto speeds of 1mph. You can also see the Vehicle Assembly Building in the background.

A good first stop on the tour, back on the bus and off to the next stop, the Apollo/Saturn V Center. This was easily the best stop on the tour, after the entry video, which seemed like US propaganda bullshit, we went into the control room for the first Apollo mission. They ran a simulation of events and showed how little the guys on the ground had to do. Only one maybe two of them were pressing buttons. I know this is a naïve misunderstanding but I thought it was funny.

Then you walked on through a door, kinda expecting that to be it, and you were struck by this view:

A full size Saturn V rocket, raised up and split into the different phases.

End of Part 1…