Gosh, they're big!

My brother Alan and sis-in-law Patti are here from north of Seattle to explore the opposite corner of the US. Early in his career, Alan was an aerospace engineer working on Skylab stuff at the Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. It was only fitting that we make a jaunt to KSC (which I keep wanting to call KFC) -- the Kennedy Space Center.

The vastness, and flatness, of the place was striking. There are miles between different launch sites (if you were within 3 miles of blast-offs, you'd die, so it makes sense). The rockets and boosters and such are ginormous.

The picture below is of the nozzles at the base of just one of the modules in an Apollo rocket, the things that shoot the propulsion stuff (liquid hydrogen and oxygen, I think, at many degrees below zero). Each nozzle must be ten feet across.

Patti approved of the seating module.

We learned about the Apollo-Saturn moon trips and the current shuttle program. Did you know that (a) big corporations are launching their own rockets into space, with full cooperation of NASA, and that (b) NASA's current goal is exploring Mars? I was taken aback that NASA seems to have a kind of manifest destiny sense of mission.

I did love the simulated shuttle launch with us as passengers. 3 G's, my friends, and a whole lotta noise and rattling and moments of near-nausea. I'd have done it again in a heartbeat if it weren't for waiting in line.

Lots of rubbernecking made me notice the sky, very odd that day. Maybe it was because the wind was coming up, and the two days since have been so blustery and cold we thought we were back in the frozen north.