Day 8 ? Geek Out

The girls decided to stay by the pool and spa while the boys went for a total Geek Out at the Kennedy Space Centre.

As well as regular entry, we booked the "Vehicle Assembly Building" tour. As there were no manned missions coming up since the retirement of the Shuttle fleet, they are now allowing public into the VAB. There's some impressive figures about this building...but you can read that on the Wikipedia link.

We did get to see the crawler parked in the VAB (it does 42 feet to the gallon) and also the new mobile tower for the next generation Space Launch System (SLS). This may appear to be a backwards step. The SLS is basically an updated Saturn V with two solid rocket boosters (from the shuttle) strapped to the side. However, the Shuttle was way more expensive than ever planned as they basically had to strip and rebuild the Shuttle after each flight. The older configuration is actually more economical.

Most people don't realise that the Shuttle never got more than 400 miles from earth (what is called "Low Earth Orbit") compared to the 240,000 miles Apollo flew to the moon.

So Low Earth Orbit is going to be left for the emerging commercial space operators, while NASA goes back to going much further.

Missions include going back to the moon, landing on an asteroid (cool) and going to Mars. It is likely that the first people who will land on Mars are already born and are aged between 6 and 16!

After stopping by the Saturn V exhibit, we headed back to the new Shuttle exhibit.

The Atlantis exhibit only opened 1 week ago. Very impressive video presentation in a 360 degree room where the front panel suddenly becomes transparent to reveal the orbiter Atlantis (the Shuttle refers to the Orbiter only when linked up to the External Tank and the Solid Rocket Boosters).

Finally swung past the shop and picked up a number of books (two of which were signed editions from a couple of Shuttle Astronauts).