Titusville and the Kennedy Space Center

From Jacksonville, we went south to Titusville. We stayed The Great Outdoors RV Resort. It is beautiful and very upscale. It is so large that it has its own wildlife preserve, church, post office, RV dealership and repair, three restaurants, beauty shop, manicurist, acupuncturist town hall. . . .

Many of the sites, such as this one next to ours (sorry, I forgot to take a photo of the one we stayed in) are covered by porticos. There are also several very upscale houses with RV ports attached. By upscale, I mean selling for a half a million and more and they look worth it. Many of the residents get around the resort in golf carts. Have a fantasy about owning some car or another? You can have one of these at a fraction of the cost, but a lot more than most of us would pay for a golf cart.

Not far from here is Port Canaveral. These two cruise liners were docked. Double click the image and you can see Mickey Mouse on the one to the left. Obviously it is a Disney cruise ship.

Just beyond it, this turkey vulture was more than happy to help some fishermen dispose of unused bait. Interestingly, we saw very few seagulls here. I suppose these guys keep them shooed away.

Turkey vultures and black headed vultures such as this one seem to have their own, rather well defined territories.

There is a lot of wildlife hereabouts. These two wild pigs were playing beside the road at the Kennedy Space Center. The black one literally ran rings around the red one. We were told that employees at the space center must check underneath their cars for alligators if they leave late at night.

One of the first things you see as you approach the Kennedy Space Center is this rocket garden. Each of these vehicles played an important part in our space history. In the left foreground is a Redstone configured similarly to the one that boosted our first spaceman, Alan Shephard, into his suborbital flight.

This is the space suit he wore on that flight. It is in the Astronaut Hall of Fame less than a mile from the Kennedy Space Center.

This is the Vehicle Assembly Building used for the Saturn V and the Space Shuttle. It can be seen from miles around. The superlative that most impressed me was that you could fit Yankee Stadium on top and still have an acre to spare. To the right rear is a pad being constructed for the Ares, the next generation space vehicle that will replace the shuttle.

This building houses an unused Saturn V. It's hard to imagine that this thing even moves, let alone flies into space.

This is the walkway over which the Apollo astronauts took their last steps on earth before splashing down after completing their missions. I must say, I had to catch my breath as I walked across it.

This is a view inside the lunar lander. Hard to imagine spending a couple of days in here, particularly the way that the astronauts of Apollo 13 had to do.

This is the crib sheet that the real moonwalkers wore on their sleeves. It detailed the proper way to sample moon rocks. To the right is the flashlight they used to read it.

Nearly thirty years ago, I promised Penny I'd fly her to the moon. Here she is feeling a small piece of moon rock. Does that count?
We really came to see the shuttle. This is the crawler that moves the shuttle from the assembly building to the pad. It can position it's load to within an eighth of an inch in any direction.

This engine, mounted in the observation tower was retired from the shuttle after leaving the earth three times. In case you're wondering about all the coats and jackets you see, it was a really chilly day, not midwest chilly, but cool nevertheless.

Here she is sitting on the pad.

Shortly before launch, they move the large gray structure that obstructs your view of the shuttle in the photo above away, and this is what you would see.

Here is a mockup of one of the labs that rode the shuttle into orbit. It was interesting to walk through them.

This is the clean room where future shuttle loads are being prepared.

There she goes!!! We barely saw her before she was in these clouds. Not too impressive until you realize that they won't launch unless the clouds are no lower than 5,000 feet.

Almost as quickly as she entered the clouds, she broke out over the top of them.

Double click this image, and you can see the two solid rocket boosters falling away as the shuttle continues on her own engine.

In the background is the smoke created by the shuttle. This bald eagle watched the whole thing undisturbed. It was almost as if he was reminding us that he and his kind were soaring high above the earth for millions of years before we got the hang of it. Penny's take was that his presence added a reminder of our need for national unity in this endeavor.