Space: The first frontier




David Whitley follows in the path of astronauts and space shuttles at the Kennedy Space Center

If there’s one thing you probably don’t expect to see at the launch site for just about every famous NASA space mission in history, it is canals full of alligators. Yet the 140,000 acre site that the Kennedy Space Center occupies is something of a wildlife reserve. There’s a certain logic to it. When lots of room is needed to ensure that watching humans don’t get fried by rockets, that’s a lot of room that humans aren’t constantly meddling with. Creatures can inhabit the gaps.

But you don’t come to Cape Canaveral to look at the wildlife. You come to indulge in astronaut fantasies. The site is so huge that you have to be ferried around the various highlights by bus, and the journeys cover miles. But the ride is worth it.

Driving along, you go past the Vehicle Assembly Building. You can hardly miss it – it’s one of the biggest buildings on earth and it’s where the space shuttles were put together. And if you’re trying to work that out, then you need to be able to fit the plane bit (the orbiter that lands after the mission) in, and strap it to an even bigger rocket whilst still inside the building. The Statue of Liberty could easily slink through the doors without ducking.

Perhaps even more remarkable is how the shuttles get to the launch site. A contraption called a crawler is sent under the platform that the shuttle sits on. It then trundles at painstakingly slow speeds along a rocky track that’s as large as an eight lane highway. It can take hours to go just a couple of miles.

The nearest you’re allowed to get at launch time is about a mile away – the L39 Observation Gantry. Inside, there’s an awful lot of info on the recently-retired space shuttles and you start to realise that there’s a lot more to firing one into space than sticking a few astronauts on top of a rocket. After every mission returned, thousands of people would spend four to six months checking every little thing before the shuttle was allowed to take off again.

For all the shuttle stuff – the launch simulator is high-tech and fun but somewhat overplayed and taking the controls for landing on another simulator is surprisingly tense – the big wow has been retired for longer. The Saturn V rocket is the most complicated, powerful machine ever developed. It involves two million separate systems, and had to pack enough punch to send man to the moon. And when you walk into the great hall – room is not an adequate word – where it is housed, there’s a genuine sensation of being utterly humbled. Lying on its side, it is longer than an American football pitch, and even the tallest men look like midgets beside it.

There are two excellent video presentations too. One is held in the control room which handled the launch of Apollo 8, the other is a more tricksy effort at telling the Apollo 11 story. The countdown to launch in the former is surprisingly tense – you feel like you’re there – and the latter ends up imparting a wealth of information you’d probably not know beforehand.

For one, I didn’t know that there were so many problems involved in the moon landing. Contact with Houston was regularly cutting out, and a serious navigation error steered the Eagle lunar module towards a rocky landing that would see it unable to ever take off again. Had Neil Armstrong not taken manual control and steered the Eagle towards a safer spot, he and Buzz Aldrin would have walked on the moon and then stayed there until their oxygen ran out.

They did, of course, make it back. But the Kennedy Space Center is where they set out from – and the sheer wealth of information and toys to play with across the complex’s numerous sites makes it one of the world’s greatest attractions. You may take your one small step for man expecting to spend an hour or two there – but you’ll almost certainly end up spending a day. Space’s first frontier is like nowhere else on earth.

Disclosure: David was a guest of the Kennedy Space Center


< Prev   Next >