On our trip through Florida with the Srigleys, we spent a day at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. We had been there years ago before we were married, but with the Srigley boys’ interest in Star Wars and rockets and the influence that has on our kids, we thought it would be a fun day trip while we were in town. We got up early that morning to get there when the center opened. The kids got more excited the closer we got because rockets and space ships were lining the roads to the entrance. We saw several space shuttles and quite a few rockets. But, the most impressive one was the Saturn V rockets that launched the Apollo missions to the moon. We all enjoyed the bus tour and the stops to see the launch pads where the shuttles take-off from. The coolest thing to see up close was the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) where they put the solid rocket boosters and the fuel canister on the shuttle and then roll it out on the crawler to the launch pad. The building itself is HUGE and it’s amazing to think that the vehicles that transport humans into outer space are assembled in that building. Plus, there is a building just beside the VAB that controls all aspects of the launch until 7 seconds before take-off when it is then sent over to Mission Control in Houston, Texas. We also got to see a 3D Imax movie about the Hubble Telescope and that was very interesting. The work that the astronauts did on the telescope once it was in orbit to fix the lenses and create a working machine that would send images to earth from outer space is mind boggling. They practiced the mission in a huge underwater pool with a life size version of Hubble to emulate the weightlessness of space. We spent some time walking through a space shuttle model and even got to meet a real astronaut. At the end of the day we were all quite exhausted from all the fun and had great memories to fall asleep to.
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