Space City, USA

We packed a lot of sight-seeing into a mini-family-reunion long weekend in Houston last week. Along with, of course, lots of visiting and catching up with far-flung family members. 

A highlight of the trip was the NASA's Space Center Houston. It's changed a lot^{[citation needed]} since we last visited when our kids were little. Wow! What a lot of cool exhibits! Including the space shuttle Independence (see above) that you actually got to go inside. Here's the insanely complicated cockpit:

And it's not just the shuttle that you get to see. It's actually perched on top of a giant airliner, as it was when being transported across the country from the High Desert in California back to Florida for its next launch. Sorry I didn't get pictures of the whole thing for you. But of course the Space Center website has better ones than I could have taken, with video, too.

We also took a couple of their tram tours. Motorized transport is required, since the NASA campus is nothing if not sprawling (so apt, being located in the capital of sprawl itself ). 

We took the two free tours that come with the price of admission. One was to a gigantic building where astronauts train for space station missions. The space was full of space station module mockups and was quite a sight to see. I liked this Russian module that sported decals from all the space station missions:

I took the picture from the raised walkway that you take along one side of the building. You can get a better idea of the scale of the place from the picture on the Space Center's website.

The coolest part of the visit, though, was the tram tour to the "Rocket Park." Inside this massive (because it has to be!) building they've put a Saturn V rocket on its side for you to examine in detail. (You can learn more about this workhorse rocket type from the video in the link above.)

Here's a shot of the gap between stages of the Saturn V:

Note tiny people on the other side of the display for scale!

Probably the most impressive part of this rocket is the hind end. Think about those videos you've seen of rockets blasting off as you stand in front of these behemoths! Again, grandchildren and son-in-law are providing scale for you:

The "hangar" where the giant rocket is housed has a whole side devoted to details of the different Apollo missions, starting with the ill-fated Apollo 1, including the almost-ill-fated Apollo 13, and ending with the last trip to the moon, Apollo 17. Super-interesting stuff.

But the NASA museum wasn't the only flight-related attraction I visited. The other was the Lone Star Flight Museum. It's located at what used to be Ellington Field, an old USAF base that I can hazily remember visiting as a child and where my father did his preflight training after enlisting in WWII.

No longer a military base, it serves small commercial flights and has this very interesting museum, full of vintage restored aircraft, and emphasizing the roles Texas has played in aviation development. We discovered that making it through all the informational exhibits just wasn't possible, given our short time frame. But gawking at all the planes was enough to justify the visit.

I didn't catch the name of the cute Union-Jack-decorated craft hanging from the ceiling, but this one was prominently labeled:

This B-25 wasn't the actual Doolittle raid aircraft, but was intended to show what that plane was like.

As I often do at well-designed museums, I enjoyed the sidelights as well as the main attractions, such as this lovely display of wooden propellers:

The technological marvels on display in this part of Houston were only part of the fun activities that we enjoyed. Next time I'll share some wonders of the natural world that we were able to experience.