Poppop and the Space center

Good Morning little Man.

Sorry you missed this one but you were just a little to small to enjoy the day. Poppop and I drove up to the Kennedy Space center to tour the launch site and other things to do with space travel. I will try and give you a brief comment on the photo's below and will explain them more to you as you get older.

Below you will see vehicles from the Apollo program, Shuttle facilities and rockets of the early days of space travel.

Before I get into the pictures I should give you a little history of My Dad's small part in the moon landings. It's been said there were about 400,000 people responsible for putting the crew of "Apollo 11" on the moon and your Poppop was one of those folks.

There was a small company called "ILC", International Latex Corporation. These guys were based near my childhood home in Delaware. They would host each Astronaut and fit them for their space clothes. Below are some pictures of molds they used to fit the gloves and your Poppop worked for them. He helped design the latching wrist bands and helmet collars.

I was hocked to learn this was my Dads first visit to the Space Center.

Mercury rocket and capsule. This rocket was used by some of our first men in space.

Below is the assembly building for the Shuttle. They stood the vehicle on it;s tail, put it on the crawler, attached the fuel cells and loaded the cargo here before it was taken to the launch pad.

Tallest single story building in the world.

The tan road is the road the crawler uses to take the shuttle to the launch pad. This vehicle moves at 1 mile per hour.

The early days of our space program used small rockets lifting one or two men into orbit. Later in the program we needed something a little bigger to lift 3 men, the Command Module, and Lunar lander into space. This monster was called the "Saturn 5" rocket.

Here they have an awesome display of the rocket on it's side showing all the parts and stages.

Below is the main stage.

Once the main stage is empty the rocket breaks into two parts. On the left of the lower picture is the top of the main stage (also seen above). This lower unit breaks away and falls into the ocean. After that, a ring sealing the two peaces together pops off and the engine on the right (below), or second stage, fires. This lighter rocket will burn almost all the way into orbit when the final stage lifts the men into orbit. The stages allow the rocket to get lighter each time a fuel container is spent and falls back into the sea. Once each fuel container is empty, it and it's rocket motors are just dead weight.  As each lower stage (section) detaches from the rocket it gets lighter and requires less energy to lift the rest upward.

Once in orbit and the 3rd stage burned and jettisoned, the crew of Apollo 11 has to begin configuring the command ship and lunar lander ready for the trip out of Earth Orbit and into the Moons orbit.

The engine below will do this.

Below is a cutout of the vehicles attached to the top of the massive Saturn 5.

Once in space the crew must eject the Lunar lander (left), spin the craft around and dock with it way out on the right side. Once this is done the rocket motor seen on the center will fire and take this mess, along with 3 men, to the moon.

Below is an actual capsule recovered from a later Apollo flight. 3 men fit in this. Notice the burn marks around the bottom from re-entry.  

A look down the side of the Saturn 5.

Molds made at the ILC facility.

Lunar lander.

The 4 pictures below are from a serf ace rover competition going on while we were there. These College students were competing with their version of the next mars rover. These vehicles are launched in un-manned rockets to other planets and controlled remotely to explore and collect surface samples.