Marc's Public Blog - Flying

We roamed around the exhibits a little bit before our level9 tour:

hard to imagine this folded and fit under the lunar lander

Then, we started our level9 tour: it's a private tour for 12 people showing many out of bounds area up front and personal, it was awesome.

I love those signs :)

Our tour started with the Saturn V rocket, and yes, it's big :)

this piece on top of the rocket is supposed to take off and take the top module with it if the rocket fails at takeoff

2nd stage

1st stage + 2nd stage

inside of 3rd stage

Next, we went to their big swimming pool where astronauts train:

From there, we went to Mission Control Center for the space station (ISS) and got some explanations from someone working there and on his break:

the zoom on my camera came in handy :)

The next part, which was super cool is that we were allowed to go in the actual mission control center used to put man on the moon:

I guess they didn't have Email yet :)

I fixed the squawk code on their console :)

The nice gentleman who took time off his break to give us a tour

I need to change my job title to this :)

We then went to see the new mission control center that will replace the old one:

I'm glad to see they use 4 LCDs like me :)

Last on our tour was their lab where they build new stuff:

copy of Soyuz for training

We then used the remaining part of the day to see parts of the museum, and came back the next morning to finish it:

one twin stays on the ground, one goes to space, and they'll compare changes after one year

impact testing

nuclear propulsion would be good

one astronaut gave us a talk

And that was it for our tour of Houston Space Center, it was plain awesome.