Day 85 - Kennedy Space Center and Conch Chowder

It was only in the 60’s this morning, cloudy and damp.  The day started with some bad luck:  the fresh water pump we had installed last November conked out.  It was supposed to be the replacement pump for what had been in there, but it never seemed to work quite right from the start.  We hooked up to city water and went on to the Kennedy Space Center.

NASA  owns 140,000 acres on Merritt and North Merritt Islands but only uses 10% of it.  The rest is a National Wildlife Refuge and home to alligators, birds, dolphin, manatee, and more.  We started the visit with a bus tour that included views of the Vehicle Assembly Building, a huge structure where they put the rockets and shuttles together, 2 launch pads, the “crawler”, a huge transport vehicle that moves the rockets from the Assembly Building to the launch pad at 1 mph, and the runway utilized by returning shuttles.  Along the route the driver pointed out a 700 pound eagle’s nest at the top of a tree with an eaglet peeking over the top and one of the parents flying in with a fish in its mouth.  There are 7 bald eagle nests on the grounds.

The bus dropped us at the Apollo/Saturn V Center where we watched 2 short documentaries on the early space and moon walk programs and walked through the exhibits.  The first film is shown in the actual control room of the first space flight, which seems archaic now.  The main feature is the Saturn V rocket, a three stage rocket which is the largest ever flown.  You can touch a moon rock and view other samples. 

We took a bus back to the main visitor’s center and walked through the Atlantis Shuttle Center and watched another documentary and viewed a shuttle.  We skipped the “virtual launch experience” and moved on to an IMAX film about the Hubble Space Telescope.  It is overwhelming to think about the endless universe while we live here on our tiny planet!

A walk through the Rocket Garden completed our tour and by now it was after 3 pm.  Our mission was to find the West Marine and purchase a new fresh water pump.  Unfortunately they did not have one, nor did Boater’s Exchange or Bobby K’s Discount Marine.  We will have to wait until the next stop.  We returned the car and they drove us back to the marina.