The entire campsite stank of sulfur, I don’t know why but it was most off putting. The Eggy stink camp I think it was called. Not very pleasant at all. I also had to contend with the extremely cheeky squirrels attacking my breakfast! They became bolder and bolder and one even became momentarily trapped in my car before scarpering through a gap in the side doors! I had to run from the table to my car and back so they wouldn’t be all over my eggy-baskets! Im not a morning person so everyone else might have thought this to be great fun, I was just miserable and pissed off :p

Not for long….!

As soon as I got packed up and on the road my bad mood disappeared since today was the day I would be going to the Space Center. Woot! I was slightly tardy in my schedule and ended up missing the tour I guess I would have like to do, the one concentrating on the Shuttle but I wouldn’t have seen more than I did anyway I guess. Atlantis was on the pad, having moved there a week or so previously, that would have been nice to see and since it takes 8 hours quite simple too. However I got a place on the now and then tour which was fine with me. The guy who gave me my sticky badge told me it was the best tour anyway which made me feel a bit better. I had to drop my GPS tracker in the card since I couldn’t take the chance they would permanently confiscate it so no geo-tagged photos (there aren’t any anyway :p). I didn’t have much time once I got in the place and had to jump right on my bus which then set off around the facility.

The tour guide pointed out the building as we went past and showed a few videos until we got to the first stop which was where they used to launch the really early rockets in a reinforced bunker. The guide then was a volunteer, a really old guy who used to work on the actual things and he gave us a good description of what it was like to have a hands on role back then, how everything was top-secret and on a need to know basis. He would work on projects and not know if anything he did turned out to be useful or not. I asked him after the tour as to whether he could go and look up the declassified papers and find out but he said at his age (and he must have been nearly 80) he had more important things to think about :p

They had a good selection of rockets and missiles outside the silo and I ran around at the end snapping away. Finally something interesting I can point my camera at (sorry Miriam :p). It was all pretty cool, and just nearby was the same rocket they made the first man made flights into space with. The guides were all very proud of the American achievements but seemed the skip over the fact that until the moon landing they were behind the Russians in every major milestone regarding space. Blind patriotism isn’t a good thing.

We stopped over at the site where the 3 Astronauts lost their lives in the Apollo 1 disaster which is now a national monument and is slowly rusting away. We could see the Shuttle Launch pads from there too, one with Atlantis and the other being altered for the next gen rocket they’re planning on using to get back to the moon on. The whole Shuttle idea was a very bad and amazingly expensive one if you ask me. They talked about having a turn around time of a couple of weeks between missions when they first started but the time scales on them now is just crazy. Its cool to watch one go up though!

We got dropped off at the Saturn 5 room which was totally amazing to walk under. What a monster. That would have been something to see launching into space! I guess you’ll get the same effect when the new rockets go up I learned that they had launched a satellite a couple of weeks before that I probably would have seen had I been looking in the right direction, even though I was in Tampa. Bah! I shot off a load of photos and took the bus back to the main area. By luck I walked into IMAX 3D place just as one of the films was about to start so watched that which was very good and then walked out to twilight which was perfect for photographing the rocket garden before heading back into town. I wasn’t paying to be smelly and get attacked again so found a friendly wal-mart and had a night there. The tickets last 2 days though so I thought I may as well take advantage of it while I was there.



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