The Kennedy Space Center

A few weeks after being in Florida, I found myself watching Apollo 13 on Star Movies. Apollo 13 is the movie that made me skip reviewing my Biology notes the night before my second quarterly exam back in high school. Only a Tom Hanks movie can do that!

This movie also brought me back to my first day in Florida… September 10, 2005….

The staff at the Grain Quality and Nutrition Research Center in IRRI had betted that I won’t be able to tour the area during my first day there because of jet lag. After all, the plane rides took more than a day! A two-hour flight to Hongkong, a thirteen-hour flight to Los Angeles, an eight-hour wait at the LA airport, and a six-hour straight flight to Orlando (or was it four?)… they expected that I’d be wrecked by jet lag and disorientation!

Jet lag? What jet lag?!

And so I arrived on a bright and early morning. I barely slept in the planes because my body clock had gone haywire on me. But once I landed at the Orlando International, I was bright-eyed and ready for some adventure! My cousin and his wife met me at the baggage claim counter. After checking in at the hotel and taking a quick shower, we had breakfast at the International House of Pancakes (ihop). Then we started the long drive to the Kennedy Space Center.

The road towards Kennedy was so big. It reminded me of the South Superhighway in the Philippines. Only in Florida, the highway had more lanes, which were also wider and smoother. Instead of rice paddies and conifers along the sides, I saw swamps and thick forest vegetation. After all, Florida was the gator sanctuary in North America. There were also huge predatory birds circling the skies above the highway. I think I saw an eagle and a crow, but I couldn’t be sure because they were so far away.

After a 45-mile journey, we took the turn towards the Center’s visitors area. The first thing that I noticed at the ticketing site was the astronaut suit on top of the roof! After buying tickets, and being inspected by the guards, we decided to catch the last bus tour to the space shuttle program…

It turned out that the Space Center was also a conservation park for dugongs, gators, and birds. The bus driver pointed at the eagle’s nest… it was as big as my Civic! Anyway, the rairoad tracks used for transporting the space shuttle from one point to the other was also BIG.

But the focal point of it all was the Vehicle Assembly Building. In there, the space shuttle can be positioned to stand up on its tail while engineers look at it, and there will still be some headspace! The doors are taller than the spacecraft because the shuttle and the two booster rockets should fit nicely through (while standing). All I could say then was WOW!

Beyond this building, there was a shuttle carrier wich literally crawled along the highway-sized road, chugging 45 gallons of fuel every mile (or hour? I’m not sure), to bring the space shuttle and the rockets to the launch pad. I didn’t get near the pad though, because the tour didn’t go there.

Next stop was the Apollo-Saturn Mission Center, where we were taken back through time to the heyday of space research, the era when man went to the moon. The highlight was this recreation of Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk and Jim Lovell’s successful failure also known as Apollo 13 (which is my fave mission). There was a life-size exhibit of the Apollo spacecraft, from service module, to command module, to lunar module. I was amazed that these people, the best engineers, to the best chemists, were able to bring men to the moon and back safely to Earth using the early computer technology (which we deem low tech today). I was really impressed!

Finally, the tour had ended and we went back to the visitors’ area. I enjoyed this trip so much because I have long dreamt of going to Cape Canaveral. Come to think of it, I became fascinated about space flights when Daddy first brought us to the Planetarium in Luneta, not when I’ve read Jim Lovell’s Apollo 13 account (which eventually became a movie).

Ah, the dream came true at last!