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:
