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.

Atlantis Found

Here is something a bit different to kick things off again. This is OV-104, more commonly known as the Space Shuttle Orbiter Atlantis. This is how I saw her in February of this year in the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center. Atlantis' first flight was on October 3rd 1985. Over the next 26 years, the orbiter travelled to space and back 33 times, spending 307 days in orbit. Atlantis' last flight on July 8th 2011 was also the last flight of the Space Shuttle Program.

All the orbiters are currently being decommissioned to be sent to museums. Atlantis will not have far to go, just a few miles down the road to the space center visitor complex. This year during the decommissioning, the VAB has been opened to tours for the first time since the early 70s. It is the last chance anyone has of seeing an orbiter in their "natural habitat".

My first impression was that they are massive. Just fricking huge. After looking it up, it turns out that they are more than 120 feet from nose to tail, nearly 60 feet tall, and have a wingspan of almost 80 feet. When they were loaded for takeoff, they weighed 240,000 pounds. With the external fuel tank and the two solid rocket boosters, the weight that blasted off the pad was around 4,500,000 pounds. Just crazy to see all that weight rocket off into the sky at thousands of miles an hour.

With the end of the shuttle program, came the end of an era in human spaceflight. Currently, the only way for humans to make it into space is in a Russian Soyuz capsule, a tiny 3 person capsule with a design virtually unchanged since the late 1960s. No longer is there the ability to do complex servicing missions on satellites such as Hubble, nor to construct such a thing as the International Space Station. It was a sad day when the shuttle program ended, but now it is up to commercial companies to design and build the space program of the future.

Hunter Over the Pool

Down in Florida the cherry blossoms were already coming out on Valentines Day. Here is Orion over the swimming pool in the backyard. There is a little purple splotch to the right of the belt, but that is just a bit of lens glare from the lights.

Weird and Wonderful

The forest in Florida is much different than around here. It is filled with all sorts of weird and wonderful plants.

Just a few hours ago I went out and got some pictures of tonight's Moon-Jupiter-Venus all close together thing. Pretty cool If I do say so myself.

Last night the three were in almost a straight line and tonight the crescent moon is right beside Jupiter.

Orion...Again

Sometimes it seems like I am constantly posting picture of Orion. There is a good reason for that. Orion is one of the most distinctive and cool looking constellations in the northern hemisphere. It is also full of awesome nebulae and is home to some bright red supergiants.

Here, the great hunter is pictured up above some trees with that weird fluffy moss stuff that covers all the trees in Florida.

Red Eye Flight

This is from Cocoa Beach in Florida. On the left is most of the Big Dipper, and just out of the frame is in fact the Kennedy Space Center. This 30 second shot happens to have an airplane in it.

On a different note, I took some pretty cool photos of the Orion Nebula tonight, I am going to play with them a little bit, and post them soon.

Palms in Paridise

Palms at Wakulah

After a day spent lying on Cocoa Beach, I spent some time lying on the beach at night. On the way back to the hotel, I found these palms overlooking the parking lot. I think this picture is pretty cool. It looks blurry, but that is just because the trees were blowing in the wind. The weird blue light on the right is from the pool.

I had a wonderful trip to Florida, including to the Space Coast and the Kennedy Space Center. I have many many pictures of all things space that I cannot wait to share. I saw rockets of all shapes and sizes, I saw an actual rocket sitting on an actual launch pad waiting to launch. I saw the pads where the shuttles flew from, I saw the shuttle Atlantis in her natural habitat of the Vehicle Assembly Building. Those are just a few highlights of my visit to Cape Canaveral, and I will talk about them later as I post the pictures.

In this we see Orion almost straight overhead lounging in a Cocoa Beach palm tree. It was neat to see the stars all in a different place because of the latitude. Over on the other coast of Florida where I spent most of my time the nights were a lot darker than I expected, lots of stars.