Friday 20-Oct-2023

Day 4: My first visit to the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), it is another beautiful sunny day and I have been looking forward to this moment for a long time. The rocket garden is a good point to start and there was a friendly guide who explained them all. The start of the American rocket program was a lot based on the material they brought back from Germany after WWII (including one of their main engineers Wernher Von Braun). The start of their space journey was one with many failures. But when in 1957 the Soviet Union launched their Sputnik the space race was on. It sparked a vigorous response from the US government to make sure they did not fall behind the USSR.

When the Soviets sent the first person into space on April 12, 1961, John F Kennedy in response challenged the nation “to achieve the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth”. This shocked the engineers at NASA who, a month later, only managed to send Alan Shepard on a Redstone rocket into space on a flight that lasted 15 minutes and 28 seconds.

The Gemini Program was developed to test equipment and mission procedures, and train astronauts, and ground crews for the Apollo program. The main goal was to test if an astronaut could actually survive in outer space for 14 days (the time it would take for a roundtrip to the Moon). Can you imagine, the president made that commitment while they had no idea if this was even possible or feasible?

When the Apollo program started they had a major setback, on January 27, 1967, Apollo 1 while doing a test run with the astronauts onboard, a fire swept through the command module and all 3 astronauts lost their life. This changed the way NASA was building its space crafts, the program went through a completely new design process to ensure this tragedy would never happen again.

Apollo 8 was the first mission that would go to the Moon and back, they were getting very close to the surface. When they passed the moon on Christmas Eve, 1968, they had the most listeners to their broadcast ever, when they read from the Bible’s Book of Genesis.

At KSC – Apollo Saturn V Center are three main sections, one about Apollo 8, a Memorial for the Apollo 1 astronauts, and an unused Saturn V rocket and Lunar Module. The later two just ready to go for another trip to the moon 😊

I also booked the KSC Explorer tour (and if you ever plan to visit KSC I highly recommend doing this). This tour goes beyond the KSC normal bus tour that takes you from the main visitor center to the Apollo Saturn V center. There are quite a few landing pads on Cape Canaveral on Kennedy Space Center. NASA now leases a number of those to commercial organisations such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, ULA, and others. Space business seems to be booming!

This tour goes very close to Launchpad 39A and B. Launchpad 39A was used for all the Gemini, Mercury, and Apollo launches and now is often used by SpaceX.

SpaceX is also building a new launch tower on 39A that will be used for their Starship once it is ready to fly. At the moment they stopped the building process after the test SpaceX did with their Starship launch on their Boca Chica site that blew up the pad.

Launchpad 39B has been upgraded and is now facilitating the Artemis launches with their SLS (Space Launch System).

What amazes me the most is to see this all so close up and try to get your head around the amount of engineering that is required to design, build and lift one of those monsters off the pad and guide the damn thing to the moon and back! And even more, if you think of the technology they had in the late ’60s.

Here are some pictures of the day: