3/9 Kennedy Space Center - Cape Canaveral

Visited the Kennedy Space Center today.  It is expensive for just the basic tour--$46 for a senior, $50 for adults!  There are a bunch of extra tours for extra money, of course, but I did not care to have lunch with an astronaut or spend more than 4-6 hours there for just the basic stuff.

Here are a bunch of the older rockets, with the Saturn 1 rocket lying on its side in the back.

There are buses that take you around much of the space center.  Here is a photo of the only active launch pad.  It mostly launches satellites and sends materials up to the space station.  Did not get very close, obviously.

And here is a photo of the Vehicle Assembly Building.  We circled it but did not stop.  There are separate tours of it:

One stop was the launch center for the Apollo rockets:

The most impressive part of the tour was the enormous Saturn 5 rocket. This was the one that sent men to the moon.  They had an extra one that was built, but the funds were never approved for launch, so they built a building to house it and other equipment from the moon shots.  It is 360 feet long on its side.  Here are some photos of all of the stages.  It's hard to visualize the size unless oyu are there.  For example, these engines were at least 60' high:

 

Here is the Apolla 14 capsule that returned from orbiting the moon.

They had several real space suits on display and some moon rocks, but I thought these mockups for spacesuit designs from the 50s pretty interesting!  I like the metal second one, especially.

Had a great day here and am glad I took the long drive here from my campground in my rental car.  Well worth it.  Some day might take another one of the tours and see the buildings I skipped.  I have found that about four hours is all I can handle in one day these days.