Nozzles

This is set of thrusters on the side of the service module of an Apollo spacecraft. I think the nozzles look really cool with the metal all changed color because of the heat of their test firings.

A Truly Large Building

This one is a bit different. This is the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC). The VAB was built in the mid 60s as a place to assemble the Saturn V rockets used for the Apollo program. The building is 526 feet tall, and was for nearly a decade the highest building in Florida. In fact, standing at the top of the VAB you are nearly 200 feet above the highest hill in Florida which lies at just 345 feet above sea level.

The building is so large that even with the massive number of fans and ventilators in the building, a particularly humid day can cause rain clouds to form inside the building. Since this photo does not really have much in the way of  a sense of scale, each of the stripes on that flag are the width of the lane on a road. If you laid the flag out on a football field, with one end on the end line, the flag would reach all the way to the 30 yard line at the other end of the field. If you laid this entire side of the building down, you could cover up six and a half full sized NFL fields including the end zones.

As I said, this was used first for the vertical assembly of Saturn rockets just as its name may suggest. Later, and in fact up until just last year it was used for the assembly of the space shuttle. The orbiters were processed in the smaller facility you can see to the left, aptly named the orbiter processing facility. They were then mated with their external fuel tank and solid rocket boosters in the VAB before being driven out to the pad on one of the crawlers.

The Very Not Full Moon

That folks is, wait for it, a piece of the moon! The Apollo missions brought back a total of 842 pounds of moon, and at the Kennedy Space Center, they have a few little pieces on display. Most are encased like this one, but they do have this one little bit that you can touch. I touched it. It was awesome. I have touched the moon. Crazy stuff.

Kitty Hawk

One of the great spacecraft of the Apollo program. This particular command module is that of Apollo 14. I saw it down in Florida at the KSC. This capsule was launched on the 13th of January 1971 and spend almost exactly 9 days in space. 2 days and 18 hours were spent orbiting the moon. Apollo 14 was the first mission to have an extended stay on the moon, the astronauts spending 9.5 hours outside the lunar module on the lunar surface over the two day period.

It was on this flight that Alan Shepard became the only person to have played golf on another planet. He brought with him two golf balls and a makeshift 6 iron and hit both balls off into the distance. There is a video of him doing this actually.

Bright and shiny at launch, re entry and splashdown in the Pacific gave the burnt up color to the capsule, mainly because it actually was burnt up a bit in the atmosphere, reaching hundreds of degrees as the atmosphere tried to burn it up. It is incredible to see the actual spacecraft that went all the way around the moon...Amazing.