[Reposted, because PowerBlogs had a hiccup.]
I hope you had a good Christmas with family and friends. Ours was long, but pleasant.

And as for gifts: Penguins! Penguins! Penguins! Penguins! Penguins!

Well, OK, I went overboard with that last one. As best I can recall, there are no penguins in Star Trek (though Spock is a little penguin-like). But I do love them penguins! And I love Sandy, who knows me well enough to inundate me with penguin stuff. I've watched March of the Penguins three times since Christmas Eve, and I haven't stopped laughing yet.

Here are more photos from my visit to the Kennedy Space Center. This visit coincided with my completion of Apollo, so my whole brain was prepped for the experience.

Here's a peek at the Rocket Garden as you approach the Visitor Center:



If you want to take one of the special tours (NASA Up-Close and Cape Canaveral: Then & Now), you're strongly encouraged to make reservations in advance. I made a reservation for NASA Up Close; and thanks to some navigation difficulties (I programmed my Hertz Never-Lost for the KSC Federal Credit Union, not KSC itself), I arrived just in time to start the tour. Our guide for the day was Don Garretson:



Don started his career in the oil business, specializing in fluid flows, gas detection, and related instrumentation. That led him to a job with the KSC engineering staff working on gas detection, containment, and transfer during construction of various facilities such as the ISS preparation buildings. Once those facilities were complete, NASA cut back on contract engineers in those areas. So Don found a job as a KSC tour guide. He's very knowledgeable and personable, and provides a great tour.

There was one down side to the tour:



I have mentioned on other occasions how much I loathe buses. Well, for this tour, I just had to put up with the bus.

For reference on the tour, here's a map of KSC (from this site):



As we pulled out of the Visitor Center, Don pointed out this:



That building you see there is the Vehicle Assembly Building, or more commonly known as just the VAB. As Don pointed out, it only looks small in this picture because of how far away it is: 5 miles. It's actually the third-largest building in the USA by volume, and has the tallest single storey anywhere. We'll see a lot more of the VAB in later photos.

Don also pointed out some other buildings. Here's the KSC Headquarters:



And here are some shots of the Operations and Checkout building (O&C), where spacrecraft modules are checked out before assembly, and where astronauts stay immediately before and after a flight:







If you look closely at the second storey of that last shot, you'll see the Door to Nowhere: a door with no stairs leading up to it. Beyond that door is the O&C clinic. After a lengthy Shuttle mission or especially an ISS mission, astronauts sometimes are in no shape to walk. They may have trouble with balance, or they may have weakened muscles and bones. The carrier that takes them from the Shuttle landing strip to the O&C is designed to lift stretchers straight up to the Door to Nowhere and into the clinic without the astronauts ever having to get up.

Our first stop on the tour was a viewing stand where visitors can sit on bleachers and look across the water to various prep launch facilities:



The left-most building is devoted to a new approach. In the traditional prep-and-launch, the rocket and its payload (collectively known as "the stack" are assembled in a building and the slowly, carefully hauled out to a launch platform. In this new facility, the stack is assembled, and then the building is moved away. The stack remains motionless, so there's no chance of anything being dislodged in transit. As Don explained it, this can reduce prep time from months to hours.

Here's a shot of the VAB from the same bleachers:



Our next stop was a preparation center for elements of the International Space Station (ISS). We couldn't photograph the modules themselves, not for security reasons, but rather to avoid a hazard: the fire suppression systems in the prep rooms might interpret camera flashes as a fire, and then drench and ruin a lot of very expensive equipment. While we were there, they were preparing the three cargo modules used to haul supplies to the ISS and haul garbage back. These are named Leonardo, Raphael, and Donatello — no, not for the Ninja Turtels, for the Italian painters. The cargo modules are made by Italy as part of their contribution to the ISS. Don told the story of how, when Raphael first came down with a load of garbage, the stench was so bad that the workers refused to go in. After sealing it up with charcoal pellets for a week, it was finally tolerable, and they could finish the clean-up.

While the ISS components could not be photographed, the ISS center included a visitor center with models and mock-ups. Here's an ISS spacesuit:



Here's a model of Skylab, the first space station:



And here's a model of Mir, the second space station.



And finally, here's a model of the ISS itself:



Here's a model of Canada's contribution: a robotic arm used for moving modules and cargo containers. I'm not sure this name is official, but I've heard it called the Canadarm:



Here's a mock-up of one of the Habitat modules:



Inside the Habitat module, here are a restroom, a shower, and a sleeping chamber:







I never figured out what the NOD module was, but here it is:



And inside, you can see that the ISS is a luxury condo as spacecraft go:



(If you don't believe me, jump ahead to the photos of the interiors of the Mercury and Apollo capsules.)

I didn't get an exterior shot of the Lab module (and frankly, they all look kinda the same from outside); but here's the gasmap, one of the experiments in the Lab:



Next, the bus took us on a drive around the VAB:



Now the word for the VAB is big; but no picture can possibly convey just how big it is. To try to give you some hint of the size: each stripe in that flag on the side is wider than the bus we were riding.

Here are the big doors used for taking spacecraft out for launch:



Again, the word is big. The Statue of Liberty could fit comfortably through those doors. A fully ready Saturn V stack with an Apollo CSM and an escape tower, though, came within 5 feet of the top of the doors.

So how would you move that massive Saturn V stack to the launch pad? That's where the crawler carrier comes in:



The crawler carrier is a massive tracked vehicle with the surface area of a baseball diamond. Moving at a top speed that's about as fast as a leisurely walk, it would haul the Saturn V out, slowly but surely, to the Pad 39 complex. (More on that below.) Today, it serves the same purpose for Space Shuttles, hauling each one out atop the Shuttle launch platform:



This is much more than a platform: it's really a small building, complete with offices and machine shops. The crawler carrier slides under it, lifts it up, and carries it into the VAB. There a crane lifts the orbiter and the external tank and the booster engines into place, so that workers can attach them. The two pylon-like buildings on top of the platform help stabilize the orbiter's tail.

But before the orbiter can be placed on the launch platform, it has to be prepped in one of the three Shuttle "garages". Here's the door into one:



Notice the door has a notch in the top to allow for the orbiter's tail fin.

Once the orbiter and the tank and the boosters are assembled, the crawler carrier pulls them out along this path:



The two lanes allow for the two sets of treads. The lanes are not gravel, but rather Tennessee River Rock from Alabama. (Hey, it was funny when Don said it!) This rock is chosen because of its small round size and hardness, but especially because it is pretty much immune to sparking under compression. In the Apollo days, sparks might be a problem, but not too big of a problem: the Saturn V engines used liquid fuel (kerosene and liquid oxygen), and were fueled up while on the launch pad. The Shuttle orbiter also uses liquid fuel; but the external boosters are solid fuel rockets. That means that they're fully fueled and ready to ignite as the Shuttle goes down the path. A stray spark at the wrong moment could lead to a fire; and that could lead to a real disaster.

After the VAB, the bus took us out to a photo stand on the Pad 39 complex. There we could see the two launch pads used for the Apollo launches as well as almost every manned NASA launch. (Unmanned rockets usually launch from the Air Force's facilities at Cape Canaveral.) Here's Pad 39A, from which Columbia launched on both her first and last flights:



And here's Pad 39B, from which Challenger launched on her last flight:



That shot of Pad 39B was a close-up as we drove past to our next stop, the Space Shuttle landing strip. Further along, we passed the Media Center where reporters and camera crews set up to cover missions:



And then we arrived at the Space Shuttle landing strip:



This is another place where a picture just can't capture the immensity. That landing strip is 15,000 feet long, making it one of the largest in the world.

Here's the traffic control tower for the landing strip:



Along the way to our last stop, we passed what looked like a futuristic junk yard:



What it actually is is what my buddy Tom Lavey would call a bunch of giant test shims. These pieces of "junk" are actually mock-ups of various fittings and assemblies from the launch pads and elsewhere. When engineers are working on new systems that have to integrate with these fittings and assemblies, they can bring their equipment here and test it on the test fittings first, rather than waiting for time on the actual launch pad and possibly wasting a lot of time. While it may sound funny to think about having the wrong sized parts at launch day, NASA knows it's not funny at all. As Murray and Cox explain in Apollo, the heat shield on the very first Mecury test capsule turned out to be larger than the missile, and had to be carved down to fit, right on the launch pad. It's better to learn that sort of thing before launch day.

Our last stop on the tour was the Saturn V Center. The Saturn V at KSC used to be outside; but when weather began to take its toll, NASA built a special exhibit center and then moved the rocket inside and refurbished it. You enter the Saturn V Center through a small stand-up movie theater which introduces you to the Apollo program. Then from there, you move into the actual Apollo Launch Control room:



There they present a complex multimedia presentation of the last three minutes of an Apollo launch. As recorded voices from the various comm loops play over the speakers, each console is spotlighted when the corresponding voice is on the loops. Meanwhile, screens overhead show video from the various cameras: Launch Control, the launch pad, and elsewhere. The presentation ends with the building-shaking sound of the Saturn V launch. And then the doors open, and they let you in to see the Saturn V itself. We'll start with my traditional rocket butt shot:



Those five F-1 engines combined to produce 7.5 million pounds of thrust; and yet as powerful as they were, they were also delicately gimballed, so that they could pivot in different directions to control the angle of thrust. Growing up, I would see film of the engines, and I always thought I was only imagining that things that big and powerful were moving; but it was no illusion.

Here's a close-up of the plumbing for one F-1 engine:



Here's a length-wise view from Stage II forward:



And here are the five J-2 engines of Stage II, as well as Stage II itself:





Here's a length-wise view from Stage III forward:



And here's the single J-2 engine of Stage III, as well as Stage III itself:





Here's an Instrumentation Unit that sat between two stages and provided cameras and other sensors:



Here's the Service Module:



Note the spherical tanks, which I believe contained H2, O2, and water.

Here's the Command Module and the escape tower (the rocket and tower which would fling the Command Module to safety in the case of an emergency before launch or early in the launch):



And here's a length-wise shot from the nose backward:



They have a second Command Module and Service Module (collectively, Command and Service Module, or CSM) on the ground beneath the nose of the Saturn V:



I think that the Command Module here is the actual CM from the Apollo-Soyuz mission:



It's supposed to be at the Saturn V Center, and I didn't see it anywhere else. Also, this CM was sealed in plexiglass, something they usually reserve for actual flight articles:



But I didn't see every sign, and I never saw a sign that identified this Command Module, so I can't be certain. (I'll verify this on my next trip.)

Here's another angle on this Command Module:



And here's a rare opportunity, a butt shot of the Service Propulsion System or SPS, the main engine of the CSM:



And here's an even more rare butt shot:



That's the Descent Engine of an actual Lunar Module (or LM, pronounced "LEM"). Not a mock-up or a tester, but a real LM. Most of the real LMs went on missions, and were left in space. Those that went to the Moon left their Descent Stages there, while their Ascent Stages usually were crashed into the Moon to gather seismic data. Other Ascent Stages burned up in the atmosphere. One went into a solar orbit.

But this LM never flew. It was commissioned and built for the Apollo 15 mission; but then they redesigned the LM to carry the Lunar Rover, and this LM no longer fit the spec. And so now it hangs from the ceiling in the Saturn V Center:



Here's a model of a LM in the adapter stage of a Saturn V:



And speaking of the Lunar Rover, there was one parked near the Saturn V:





And nearby is a replica of an Apollo spacesuit:



And near the nose of the Saturn V was the Moon rock I showed in my previous post:



Here's a description of the Moon rock:



Also near the nose was this van used to carry the astronauts out to the launch pad:



And there was also another multimedia theater which showed movies of the actual landing footage from Apollo 11. And then, at just the right moment, they switched from movies to stage performance, dropping a replica LM down to a simulated Moonscape. It came out of nowhere and was a very effective special effect. Then they showed movies of Armstrong and Aldrin exploring the Moon; and at just the right moment, the replica Ascent Stage took off back into the sky. It was awesome (but not quite authentic: during the actual Apollo 11 ascent, the exhaust from the Ascent Engine actually knocked over the American flag that Armstrong and Aldrin had planted; but it stayed standing in this presentation).

A different bus took us back to the Visitor Center; but before I discuss that, there are a couple of miscellaneous shots from the tour. Don was sure to point out several times that most of KSC (130,000 acres out of 140,000) is a wildlife refuge. In particular, he liked to point out the alligators, from the safety of a moving bus. I wasn't fast enough to get many alligator shots, but this was the best one:



And here were some birds:



Because the waters around KSC are home to manatees, outboard motors are severely restricted; but air boats are common:



Back at the Visitor Center, the first place I went was the Rocket Garden. Here's a Redstone:



Here's an Atlas:



And here's an Atlas with an Agena rocket attached:



Here's a Titan:



Here's a J-2 engine:



And here's an F-1 engine:



Here's an actual Saturn V gantry, which took the astronauts from the launch tower to the White Room and then into the Command Module:



You could walk this (safely on the ground) into the White Room and then look inside a Command Module mock-up:



And here's a Saturn I:



It was held in reserve as a possible lifeboat for Skylab, but was never needed.

After the Rocket Garden, I went to the Exploration in the New Millenium pavillion, where they have exhibits on past, present, and future missions beyond the Moon. Here's a mock-up of the Viking probe on Mars:



And here's a mock-up of the Cassini-Huygens probe that explored Saturn:



After that, I waited for the last Astronaut Encounter of the day. This guy didn't seem too impressed:



"He flew. Big deal. I've been doing that since I left the nest!"

Finally, astronaut John Fabian appeared and spoke to the audience:



Colonel Fabian was in Air Force ROTC at Washington State University, and then served as a combat pilot, with 96 missions to his credit. He was a Mission Specialist on STS 7 (Sally Ride's first mission) and STS 51G (where he served alongside Sultan Salman Abdulaziz Al-Saud). After his talk, he posed for photos:



By that point, it was almost closing time, so I missed out on this:



That's a full-sized Shuttle mock-up, in an area of the Visitor Center that I never got to. But fear not, Shuttle fans! I'll have more photos. I'll be back Saturday, including a reservation for the Cape Canaveral: Then & Now tour. (And if I still haven't got all the photos and info I need, I can spare almost half a day there Sunday.)

But just because KSC was closing didn't mean my day was done. The Astronaut Hall of Fame (just across the bridge to the mainland) stays open 90 minutes later. 90 minutes isn't really enough there, but it's a start. Here's the entrance:



And here's the dedication:



And when you walk in the door, the first thing you see is Alan Shepard, first American in space, cast in bronze:



And behind that is a tremendously large mural of an astronaut reaching for the stars:



But that's not just a mural. The signature at the bottom reads Alan Bean, the fourth man to walk on the Moon. Since his retirement in 1981, Captain Bean has made his career as one of the preeminent space artists in the world.

Beyond the turnstyle, you'll find actual Mission Control consoles from Project Mercury:



As well as an actual Project Mercury spacesuit:



But those are just lead-ups to this:



That's the Sigma-7, the Mercury capsule flown by Wally Schirra. Here's an interior shot:



But that's not the only hardware to be found at the Hall of Fame. Here's my main goal for this visit:



That's the Apollo 14 Command Module, flown by Alan Shepard, Stu Roosa, and Ed Mitchell, completing the mission to the Fra Mauro highlands that was interrupted by the Apollo 13 disaster. Here's an interior shot:



And here's a shot of the hatch:



Spacesuits evolved from the Mercury era. This intermediate stage was nicknamed the Grasshopper:



By contrast, this is an exhibit of flight helmets worn by aviators who went on to be Hall of Fame astronauts:



Well, that's a start. Look for more photos after my return visit Saturday.

...Kennedy Space Center. Because I can (T-Mobile willing).

Here's just a quick photo:



The hand in the photo is mine (identifiable by my wedding ring). And the black wedge shape I'm touching? That's a Moon rock.

Yes, I touched the Moon today.

(Well, actually, the rock is under a very thin layer of plastic; but that's still close enough for me.) Update: Further research, while not conclusive, indicates that you get to touch the actual rock. It just happens to have a rather smooth surface.

More later.

So I'm in Dallas in an ice storm, watching the local news to keep up with flight status. And the newest ice-related incident is live footage of a semi truck jack-knifing and catching fire and slamming into a media van. Ugly, but all drivers appear to have escaped without major harm.

But the news lady just added new information: the burning truck is full of UPS packages, and burned at least five minutes before any firefighters arrived.

If you've sent any Christmas presents via UPS, you might want to go to their tracking page and see if your package was passing through Dallas. If it was, you may not be done with your holiday shopping after all.

Fire now looks to be under control now, but some packages are gonna be toast.

Update: And the amazing story of the day is that so far, despite numerous accidents all over the area, there are no fatalities anywhere in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. May they continue to be so fortunate.

Update 2: What a different world. Someone from the road commission is on TV explaining road salt to all the viewers. In Michigan, that's kind of like explaining air: if you're alive, you know about it.

So quite by accident, I ended up visiting the Apollo 13 and Apollo 16 Command Modules. And next week, thanks to an unexpected .NET BootCamp gig in Orlando, I'll get a chance to visit the Kennedy Space Center (where the Apollo-Soyuz Command Module is located) and the United States Astronaut Hall of Fame (where Apollo 14 is located).

And that led me to wonder where the various Command Modules are today; and that led me to this site, which tells where to find all sorts of American spacecraft. And that plus Microsoft MapPoint led me to produce this map (warning: large download):



The dark blue triangles represent Apollo Command Modules. (Not shown: Apollo 10, found at the Science Museum in London, England.) The light blue triangles represent Apollo Command Modules that I have visited:

• Apollo 8, at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. I haven't been there in two decades, so I don't have any digital photos to post. But I've seen it.


• Apollo 9, now at the San Diego Aerospace Museum, but formerly at the now-defunct Michigan Space and Science Center. I used to make side trips there whenever my travels across the state allowed, so that I could gaze on Apollo 9 and remind myself that my job's not rocket science. But again, that was before I had digital photo capability.


• Apollo 13, at the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson.


• Apollo 16, at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville.


• Apollo-Soyuz, at the Kennedy Space Center. Sandy and I went there during one day of our honeymoon. Again, that was long before digital photos. But we were there!

And then I realized: I have visited five out of fifteen Command Modules (sixteen, if you count the test module in Seattle, listed here). And that began to sound suspiciously like a quest: to visit or revisit them all, and get a complete set of photos posted here on my blog.

So imagine my delight when I realized that I was speaking in Dallas this week, and that the Apollo 7 Command Module is located at the Frontiers of Flight Museum at Love Field, a museum dedicated specifically to ground-breaking aircraft that set the course for aircraft to follow. I made sure to squeeze time into my schedule for a visit, so that I could convert one of those triangles from dark blue to light blue. The photos that follow are the results.

Let's start with the star of the show. As you enter, you see Apollo 7 from the rear:



Then you come around the side, and see the open hatch:



And then you climb steps for the front view:



The Apollo 7 Command Module fits the mission of the museum well, since it was the first manned launch of a Command Module. This is also the first Command Module I've seen where it was easy to see the hatch interior:



And of course, there's the obligatory interior shot (behind plexiglass, as always):



Apollo 7 was not the only Apollo-era memorabilia at the museum. Here's Don Eisele's spacesuit:



Here are Charlie Duke's gloves:



In the background, you can also see one of the dread urine collector packs. Here are some other pieces of Apollo gear:



Here's a pressure chamber used in Skylab to test how astronauts' lower extremities behaved in various pressures and zero gravity:



Here's a Skylab exercise bike, used to test how astronauts systems behaved under exertion in space:



And here's a Skylab Experiment Support cabinet:



From what I could tell, the top part of the cabinet contained slots into which various powered modules could be plugged for various experiments. The bottom part looked like it contained drawers for supplies for the experiments.

Near Apollo 7, they had a very small movie theater showing Apollo footage. That also held a tiny chunk of Moon rock:



And they had a roughly three-foot model of a LM:



I'm so jealous!

Near the theater, they had exhibits from Beal Aerospace's new developments in lifting vehicles and engines, many of which are being manufactured or tested in the area. Here'a a scale model of the BA-2 launch vehicle:



And here's a (large) description:



Here's a combustion chamber and nozzle from one of their BA-810 engines:



And here's a (large) description of the engine:



And here's part of their PR material (again, large):



Near the Beal display is a Regulus II cruise missile:



I don't think I ever realized how large a cruise missile is, nor how much like an airplane it is. I guess that's the point: rather than following a ballistic arc, it cruises to the target like a plane.

And in keeping with my tradition ("Always include a butt shot of the rocket"), here's a butt shot of the Regulus II:



Here's a Huey helicopter:



And here's an F-16 fighter, famed for still today beating aircraft that are 30 years newer:



An Airman I know works on the explosive ejection seat mechanisms for fighters. He should appreciate this history of ejection seats:











Here's an A-7 Corsair II:



Here's a Crusader RF-G:



And here's some plane:



And here's some other plane (I think it might've been the "Sopwith Pup"):



There were more details about those last two planes, and a lot of other exhibits as well; but my camera batteries were failing. And besides, I wanted to get back to my hotel and off the roads. Dallas was starting to do this:



Man, a little glare ice all over the place, and these Texans just forget how to drive...

Update: I'm a little disappointed. I've visited Atlanta, Cleveland, Dayton, Seattle, and the Pensacola region, and I never realized there were command modules nearby. Those could have put me up to eleven, twelve after next week. I'll have to try to correct those mistakes.

And I have no idea how I'll find an excuse to get to London...

Of course, the down side to the travel arrangements that Justin made for me was that I was traveling:

1. One way.


2. On extremely short notice.


3. With no checked luggage.


4. On a ticket paid for with somebody else's credit card.

And naturally, somewhere in there I won the TSA lottery: my boarding pass was marked with the magic symbols that mean "Give this guy a full screen."

Now as I wrote before, I take airport security seriously. I know it's common for people to grumble about TSA's screening, especially the random screenings. But I support the screening process, including the random screenings: if you only screen according to a set of rules, that creates a pattern that terrorists can discover and exploit. Random screenings mean that any attempt at discovering such a pattern can be discovered. Plus I put myself through college working as a security guard, and I know how hard that job can be for those who are conscientious about their work. So I'm not going to complain about being selected for screening, especially when my travel circumstances probably did fit a risk profile.

But still, there's not complaining; and then there's being impressed by how professional the screeners are. Back in the 2002-2003 time frame, screening was much more frequent, and I could expect extra screening almost one trip out of five. Then the screening rate dropped. This was probably the first time I've been the subject of extra screening since 2003.

And the process has changed. As I said, it's professional. No, I think an even better word might be polished. The TSA screeners at SEA-TAC were polite, efficient, patient, professional, and polished. They explained what was happening, and they explained the process in full before they proceeded. They let me choose how much privacy I wanted. They were careful with all of my belongings. They were as unintrusive as they could be while still doing a thorough screening job. And with me on a relatively short schedule, they held me up for only as long as it took to clear my stuff and my person. As a former security guard, I was very impressed with how these folks did their job effectively and still managed to be considerate toward the public.

Because of my tight schedule, I didn't get their names or badge numbers. I regret that, because I would like to commend them by name to their supervisors. There's another lesson from my days as a guard: everyone complains if you slip up, but no one seems to notice if you do your job well. Well, this passenger noticed; and I thank those TSA screeners for making travel safer and still making it as pleasant as possible.

I wake up. Check the clock. 6:10 a.m. OK, I'm in Seattle. That means it's really 3:10 a.m., since I never change the time zone on my computer. My flight is set for 6:00 a.m., and I requested a 3:30 a.m. wake-up call from the hotel. I guess I might as well get up now, since I have to get ready to leave.

Wait a minute. I didn't get the time from my computer. I got it from the TV. Which is on Pacific time. Just like my flight.

Which left Seattle ten minutes ago.

Oh, crap. I call the front desk. They have no record of my wake-up call being requested.

Yes, I was angry. I'm human, after all. I had to get home for a my nephew's Eagle Scout award and for a family funeral. This was not helping.

But then I remembered: the hotel staff are human, too. And getting mad won't do anything to make it better.

Here's my message to companies that want my business: I don't expect you to be any more perfect than me (which isn't a very high bar); but when you make a mistake, I expect you to make it right, just as I would hope that I would do in your shoes.

And that's just exactly what Justin Gaston, Operations Manager for the Bellevue Redmond Courtyard, did. His staff immediately offered me a free breakfast (for which I had no time, but the offer still was nice); and Justin personally got on the phone, called the airline, and arranged a new flight home for me, all at no charge to me. Justin was polite, helpful, apologetic, and sympathetic; and he absolutely did right by me.

Yes, I got to DTW eleven hours later than scheduled. Yes, the hour was then so late and the weather so bad that I had to spend the night in a hotel near DTW. Yes, I got home over a day late, by the time all was said and done. Yes, the world's an imperfect place. Nothing's perfect.

But the service that Justin and his staff provided and the efforts they did to correct their mistake came pretty darn close to perfect.

If you'll be in the Redmond area, I strongly encourage you to patronize the Bellevue Redmond Courtyard, 14615 NE 29th Place, Bellevue, WA 98007 (Ph: 425-869-5300). They have reasonable rates and fine rooms, with free high speed Internet access. They're conveniently right across the highway from Microsoft's main campus if you have business there. And they have a staff that should make the Marriott chain proud.

Well, I finally found something negative to say about my Gateway CX200X. I wrote:

Where is that pen? OK, there it is, but how does it come out? The release switch for the pen is a bit tricky to find. (And no, I didn't bother to read the directions.) But it seems pretty secure.

Well, I couldn't have been more wrong. The release switch is on the underside of the machine, exactly where I grab the machine to lift it off my lap or off a table. That pen keeps popping out without me noticing.

And today, finally, it popped out completely without me noticing. I just went to use the pen, and it's gone. It might be on the plane; it might be at DFW; but it's nowhere in this hotel room.

And as I also wrote:

...the Tablet team gave me a nice Cross-brand Tablet pen with eraser end; but the CX200X doesn't appear to recognize that pen.

In other words, the only pen that I know will work with it is a Gateway pen. Just last night at the Chippewa Valley .NET User Group (CVNUG), I told one of the organizers that I needed to order a spare pen before I lost the original. And sure enough, today it's lost.

So I called Gateway; and even with express shipping, the soonest they can be sure it will reach me is three to four days. Since I fly out to Orlando Sunday, that means I'm going to be gone by then. Fortunately, they will ship to my hotel in Orlando. Still, I'm without a Tablet PC pen for half a week. That puts a crimp in a lot of my work.

Hey, Gateway, here are three design suggestions for you:

1. Use a more common pen mechanism, so that third party pens (i.e., Cross) will work with your Tablets.


2. Add eraser ends to your pens.


3. Move that pen eject button, or else add a lock button like you did for the battery. (That battery lock does a great job of preventing exactly this sort of problem.)

I still love my Gateway. I'm just frustrated without the pen. I have work to do on Tablet UML, and I'm stalled.

Update: On the silver lining side, Gateway's phone sales support was top notch. The guy on the other end of the line was knowledgeable, articulate, personable, and helpful. He made the best of a bad situation. I'm very impressed with Gateway as a company, from my initial purchase process, to the quality of the product, and now to the quality of the sales support. They get my strongest recommendation.

Somewhat belatedly continuing the story of my visit to the Cosmosphere...



This is the harness that carried Enos, the first chimpanzee to orbit the Earth.









At the Cosmosphere, they have a LM mock-up where you can get quite close (closer than I got in Huntsville).





You can also get pretty close to their lunar rover.



Here's a sort of diorama of two Apollo Lunar suits in front of a lunar rover.



This is a docking probe, used to connect two spacecraft together. In all my reading, I had never known how these worked. Looking at the probe close up, I could get a little better view of how collapsing the "arms" inside the probe would trigger the docking latches. There's still something I'm missing, but it made more sense after I saw this.





Here are a couple of views inside a LM trainer.







Here are three views of the Apollo 13 Command Module, Odyssey.



Here's an unfortunately fuzzy shot of a fuel cell like the one that exploded during the Apollo 13 mission.



Here's Odyssey's heat shield, after it has done its work of keeping the crew safe from reentry heat.





Here's a mockup of the Soviet Lunokhod lunar probe.











This is a long string of pictures from an Apollo-Soyuz mock-up.



This is the lab where they perform restoration on the artifacts.

Well, that's enough for now. With luck, I'll have pictures of three more Command Modules in the next two weeks. Details later.

In my post on my visit to the Cosmosphere, I oversimplified the timeline from Mercury to Apollo. Serves me right for working from memory. Since then, I've had a chance to refresh my failing memory through rereading Apollo by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox.

I say rereading; but in a sense, this is reading anew. I own a copy of the first edition of this book, and have read it three times. I find it to be without a doubt the most thorough history of Apollo that's available. Why? Because where other fine books — such as Chaikin's most excellent A Man on the Moon — focus primarily on the astronauts, this book is first and foremost about the engineers and managers who made the flights possible. I don't want to disparage the work the astronauts did. Indeed, this book (like many others) makes clear that their work began years before they climbed into their spacecraft, and involved plenty of engineering on the ships themselves, along with their training. I have the utmost respect for the astronauts; but as I wrote elsewhere, I'm not the astronaut type. But these engineers... Ah, now these are my people, my inspirations... These are the people whose example moves me to try to do better in my day-to-day work. Whenever my work seems tough, I look at what they did, and say, "No, my job really isn't rocket science. I can do this."

And Murray and Cox's book was the one that made me really appreciate the intellect and discipline and creativity and ingenuity that made Apollo happen. And so, when I saw the new edition with its colorful new cover at the Cosmosphere gift store, I couldn't resist. Mr. Murray had already told me (in private email) that there wasn't much new in this edition, and he couldn't honestly recommend buying a new copy. (So why a second edition? As they explain in the new foreword, the book has become very popular since the first edition went out of print, and they get lots of requests for it. With good reason, I might add.) But fortunately for their bank account, I'm weak. I'm rereading the book now, and finding it even better than I remembered it. It appears that Murray and Cox may have gone the self-publishing route on this edition, since it's published by their own South Mountain Books. I looked into self-publishing for some of our course materials a few years back. Judging by this book, the technology has improved. The quality of the printing is very good; and as I indicated, the new cover is stunning. The only major change from the first edition is that the photos in this edition aren't on glossy paper. That actually makes for a stronger binding, I believe; but it makes it harder to browse to the pictures, since the picture pages are just like all the other pages.

Anyway... Apollo explains the political history of the program very well. It tells how President Kennedy inherited a space program he really didn't want (though Vice-President Johnsn was a strong supporter), including Project Mercury; and then it tells how, after Soviet space triumphs and the Bay of Pigs debacle, President Kennedy needed a symbol of success. And so he turned to the very space program he once disdained, and said: "What can you give me?" And the managers named a number of conservative, very attainable goals; but none of them was inspiring, and none would demonstrate superiority to the Soviets.

And then they suggested the more extreme goal: "We could go to the Moon." And that grabbed President Kennedy's imagination; and that's what he promised us and the world that we were going to do.

Now from a geopolitical and domestic political position, that proclamation was brilliant: a bold challenge to the Soviets and a bold challenge to the American people. Yet from a technical perspective, it might have proven a horrible misstep. To this day, many in the space travel business will argue that a space station should have been our first goal before the Moon, and that we would have been much farther along in space today if we had followed that course; and indeed, some still pressed for that approach. But with President Kennedy's assassination, Project Apollo took on the mantle of Legacy to a beloved President; and Vice-President Johnson, now succeeded to President, had been NASA's strongest supporter in the Kennedy administration, and was determined to see the Legacy through. That's a combination of historical forces that no one could withstand.

(In a bit of alternate history speculation, I have to wonder what would've happened to Apollo and NASA had President Kennedy lived? Would NASA have persuaded him to let them follow the more cautious approach? Would we have a permanent space colony today, maybe even including settlers on Mars? Or would his attention have lagged as Vietnam and other problems rose? Would a Congress less in awe of his memory have been more willing to cut NASA's funding? Would we even today be waiting for that first footprint on the Moon? I can see a case for either possibility; but we're stuck with the future we have, not the might have beens.)

So Apollo tells of the wrap-up of Project Mercury (the effort to get Americans in orbit), and also of the Gemini program (the effort to learn how to maneuver and work and rendezvous in space); but both are told only briefly and peripherally. As the title suggests, the focus here is all on Apollo. The book is divided into Books:

• Book One, Gathering, tells of the formation of NASA, and of the history of the decision to go to the Moon (as above, only with a lot more history and detail).


• Book Two, Building, tells of the design and construction of the Saturn V, culminating in the story of the first unmanned launch. And along the way, it tells of The Fire. All NASA histories have this in common: there's before The Fire, and after The Fire; and those are two different stories, and even a casual reader can tell. NASA changed in that event. In facing death, NASA had to grow up in some necessary but sad ways. The Can Do people learned that sometimes they couldn't.


• Book Three, Flying, tells the history of the flight controllers in Mission Control, and how they worked with the astronauts during the Apollo missions. And it's here that the real engineering all comes together. As a computer geek, I empathize with these earnest young men glued to their monitors, each watching dozens of simultaneous data points and looking for some key discrepancy that might affect the mission. The book's descriptions of this work are the closest literary equivalent I've ever seen to what it's like to chase down a really ephemeral bug in a mountain of code... except that my bugs usually don't have the lives of three astronauts hanging in the balance... and I usually have more than twenty seconds in which to analyze the data... and I don't have to decide whether to scrub the most-watched mission in history based only on my possibly buggy code... and I don't have to worry about lightning striking my machines and resetting everything right in the middle of the most critical operations... and I don't have to worry about a fuel cell exploding and putting the entire organization into hyper-overdrive. Murray and Cox explore each of these incidents in depth, and they really make me feel the tension of being in the MOCR, making life-and-death decisions based on instinct, experience, and ceaseless drills. They also give what I believe to be the definitive explanations for The Fire and the Apollo 13 accident, as well as a blow-by-blow description of the Apollo 12 lightning strike that made my hair stand on end.

After this, I may go reread Chaikin. I also have EECOM Sy Liebergott's biography (a signed copy picked up at the Cosmosphere) to read. And I may go reread Lost Moon. But this will always be the book that revitalized my childhood love of space travel and made it relevant to me in my career today. For that alone, I would recommend it; but more than that, it's just a fascinating view of Apollo that's usually seen only in the background. That makes it even more valuable to the space fanatic.