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  • Recollections of Kennedy Space Center

 Welcome to the Classical Astronomy Update!

" Dear Mr. Ryan, Have you ever been to the Kennedy Space Center? If so, can you tell me about your experience?"

On three occasions in my life, I've been to Kennedy Space Center in Florida, in 1969, 1995 and 2003. The first visit was one of the highlights of my childhood.

Like most little boys in the 1960s, I was totally obsessed with the NASA space program. The early NASA space flights dominated my entire childhood. I was born in April, 1961 -- 13 days after Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, but 10 days before American Astronaut Alan Sheppard followed, kicking off the "Space Race." I entered this world just as man was taking his first steps into space.

Being a little kid, I was oblivious to the trouble in the world. Each night, the TV news was full of the Vietnam War and riots in the streets. But the only TV news that interested me showed rockets carrying men into space, reaching new milestones over the span of weeks and months. It's hard to adequately explain the excitement of the early NASA days to someone who didn't live through it. In America, the 1960s really were "the best of times and the worst of times." But if nothing else, 1969 was a great year to be eight years old!

It's a long ride from Ohio to Florida. But it was longer in the 60s since the freeway system was still under construction. Most of the trip South was on state and federal routes, through the small towns of Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia. And there were many hard-to-avoid "tourist traps" that added time to the trip. It took four days each way to get there and back, compared to only 20 hours nowadays.

Like many northerners, I was amazed at my first sighting of a palm tree! There is so much to do in Florida, like seeing the sights and swimming in the ocean. And we had to do all that stuff first, since Grandma planned the Kennedy visit for the return trip! We spent that Fourth of July in Miami and a couple days later headed back North.

The bus ride was a long, weary tour of the NASA base. We passed many sites where the Mercury and Gemini rockets were launched. The gantries and launch pads for these rockets were still there, though they were no longer in use. The bus lingered at a "Friendship 7" memorial in honor of John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth. Who would have known then that this space hero would someday be our Senator from Ohio!

The tour bus stopped and let us off in a "blockhouse" -- a reinforced concrete bunker near the launch pads, where mission controllers would monitor the launches from "up close." The room had that plain, white "NASA look," with rows and rows of consoles -- functional perhaps, but not of greatest interest to little boys! I was happy to be at NASA, but we still hadn't seen the good stuff! But that was finally the next stop!

Where Moon Rockets are Made

The bus parked near the huge brown and white building. The ground was all dusty, even though the site was in the middle of an alligator-infested swamp. There were no other buildings around, and there was no pavement that I could see. The Vehicle Assembly Building was the only structure around that could be seen, except for trees and the dusty parking lot.

Our tour guide led us through one of the giant doors into the place. These doors were made large enough so that the 363-foot Saturn V Apollo Moon rockets could be taken out for launch. The ceiling was so high, it was almost like not being indoors. I've heard that the Vehicle Assembly Building is so high and wide open that clouds actually form inside!

Inside the Building, there were the top pieces of two Apollo rockets, sitting side by side. I instantly recognized them as each being the top of the third stage of a Saturn V, with the Command Module that carried the astronauts, the Service Module underneath that propelled the craft to and from the Moon. Under the "CSM" (Command and Service Modules) was the tapered section that opened up to release the LEM, or "Lunar Excursion Module."

I gazed in awestruck wonder -- these were real space ships! These were only the topmost pieces of a Saturn V, maybe one-quarter of the total Moon rocket. Yet they towered overhead, much taller than most common buildings. My young mind pondered that these rockets that I was staring at would actually go to the Moon. Except for the Command Module, which was the crew capsule, none of these pieces would return to the Earth.

So here were these two Apollo rocket sections, sitting next to each other. Our guide informed us that these were the top sections of Apollo 12 and Apollo 13. Though I didn't know it until the next April, I had seen with my own eyes the Service Module that exploded en route to the Moon. The system fault that nearly killed the three astronauts of Apollo 13 was already hidden below the panel that I had seen.

Sadly, my Grandma was not allowed to take pictures inside the Vehicle Assembly Building. We were told that because of security during the Cold War, NASA could not risk allowing Soviet Russian agents to photograph our secrets. I was very disappointed, so I burned the image into my memory. But in retrospect, in that simpler era of American life, it's amazing that they even allowed us into the place at all.

Outside the Vehicle Assembly Building, behind a white picket fence, was one of the giant grey "crawlers." These are movable launch pads upon which the Apollo rockets were built. Upon assembling the vehicles in the Vehicle Assembly Building, the crawler would slowly roll the giant rocket across the ground to the pad where it would be launched. The one I saw may have been the one upon which Apollo 13 was assembled.

All the things I saw were so big, so incredibly enormous, so mind-boggling to an eight-year-old boy from Cleveland, Ohio. It's lately been fashionable among the young generation to say the Moonwalks were a hoax, that we never even sent men to the Moon. All I can say as an eyewitness is that NASA certainly constructed some very elaborate props to fool everyone!

There it was, before our eyes, the Moon Rocket itself -- Apollo 11! We were quite far away but there was no mistaking the gigantic Saturn V off in the distance. In addition to the red launch gantry, there was the other grey gantry used to move the craft. My Grandma tried to walk a bit closer to snap a better picture with her Kodak. In these pictures, Apollo 11 is silouetted by the afternoon Sun, but the familiar black and white markings can still be seen.

After seeing such wonders of the modern era, our tour was over. We left Cape Kennedy and I was elated! We stayed in a motel in Titusville, Florida, and the motel was next to a lake. As the Sun set on that amazing day, I looked out over the water behind the motel and saw the Vehicle Assembly Building off in the distance, as twilight overtook the scene....

Part II -- The Moon Landing

Like every other kid, I got up on the morning of July 16 to watch the launch of Apollo 11. It was so cool to see the rocket on TV, after just seeing it in person only a handful of days before. The TV showed a constant image of the rocket on the pad, with a countdown clock ticking away the seconds. The soundtrack was mostly "NASA-speak" -- the strange engineering lingo of the mission controllers. It would no doubt be boring television by today's standards, since glitzy computer effects were still decades away. But we were content to see history being made as it happened.

The engines roared to life as the clocked counted down to zero. "Liftoff -- we have liftoff," said the mission controller as Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins embarked on their trip to the Moon. The cameras stayed on the Saturn V as it rose into the blue Florida sky. We could see the first stage drop away as the second stage ignited. Then the second stage itself fell away as the rocket with its third stage entered Earth orbit.

The Apollo 11 coverage continued for hours as the rocket orbited the Earth. I liked the ABC News because they had science correspondent Jules Bergman, who gave the best explanations. After the main excitement was over, the network broke away for some commercials. The best ones were for "Tang," which was this awful-tasting orange drink mix. But all us kids drank Tang anyway because it was "The Drink the Astronauts Took to the Moon." Plus, they had these funny cartoons with little alien "Moon Men" who were excited that the astronauts were coming to visit!

As the next four days passed, the news was filled with the mission progress, and more excellent explanations from Jules Bergman. We heard the voices from Apollo, but these were hard to follow, since they were in pure NASA-speak. And they sounded like a they were talking into a tin can through a pillow, with a good bit of static, and a short time delay for the sound signal to reach Earth. Plus, every so often there was this beep -- always that beep! I could never figure out what was the story with that beep! The soundtrack of Apollo sounded something like this:

Apollo: Houston, we have a tranverse bidirectional port manifold indicator of 35 pounds.

(pause)

Houston: Roger that.

(beep!)

Clearly, if NASA wanted to fake the Moon missions, they could have made the dialog more interesting!

Finally there was the noticable look of dust being blown away, as though the Eagle were very close to the Moon. And Commander Armstrong announced, "Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed!" Only later did the folks back home in TV Land learn that there were several computer errors, and that Eagle was perilously close to running out of fuel. But Neil Armstrong sounded cool as a cucumber, and no one would have realized from his calm NASA-speak that he and Buzz Aldrin were very close to death during that landing.

I expected that the next thing would have been to leave the Eagle and walk on the Moon. But I was sadly mistaken. The LM needed to "decompress" which meant to slowly let all the air out. So the actual Moonwalk was scheduled for many hours later, after my bedtime! Oh no! This was the worst disaster possible! I begged my Mom and she promised that I could get up and watch the Moonwalk.

After sleeping for hours, I didn't want to wake up, but my Mom got me up anyway. I stumbled blearily downstairs to the living room where the family was huddled around the TV. A grainy, gray image of a barely distinct human figure was seen. We were told this was a picture of Neil Armstrong on the LM ladder, taken from a TV camera on the leg of the Lunar Module. The grainy figure dropped down. Millions of people around the world heard the famous line, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for Mankind." Neil Armstrong was walking on the surface of the Moon!

My great-grandmother was watching this broadcast with us. She was born in 1880, and came to America with her parents from Poland as a little girl. She was already an adult when the Wright Brothers flew their plane at Kitty Hawk. Though she died the next year in May, in her lifetime, she had lived from the "horse and buggy" era through "The Space Age." I can only wonder what she might have thought as we watched the events of that night.

Before going back to sleep, I went out on our front porch and looked at the waxing gibbous Moon, which was hanging low in the West above the treetops across the street. I was totally amazed at the thought that, as I looked at the Moon, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were walking there. I strained my eyes to look at the Moon as hard as I could, in that dark patch known as "The Sea of Tranquility." And in my little eight year old mind, I was so sure that I could just barely see the stars and stripes of our flag on the Moon!

Part III -- After Apollo

Over the next three years, there were six more flights to the Moon, and eventually the Apollo program ended. Most of NASA's energy in the 70s was spent on smaller ventures like Apollo/Soyuz and Skylab, while unmanned space probes explored the solar system. The Space Shuttle era began in the early 80s, but there has never been as much excitement about the space program after Apollo.

And through these years, I grew up myself. At age eight, I wanted to be an astronaut -- the first man on Mars! This childhood dream passed with age, as it did with all the other little boys of the Space Age. As the years went by, I gave my heart to Jesus, got married and became a dad. The Apollo program faded to a pleasant childhood memory. In 1995, our family took a trip to Florida. There was one place in particular that I wanted to revisit.

Kennedy Space Center -- 1995

Somewhere down the line, the locals took back the name of their home, from "Cape Kennedy" to "Cape Canaveral." So now "The Cape" became known as "Kennedy Space Center," or "KSC" to savvy anagram-users. As we drove down the road toward the center, I expected to pull up to the front gate at the Administration Building, as we had done years before. But instead, we were diverted into "Spaceport USA," a regular Orlando-esque tourist trap dedicated to NASA.

This "Spaceport" was a typical kitschy venue such as one expects to find in Central Florida. The old rocket garden from the front of the Cape Kennedy Administration Building in '69 had apparently been moved to this spot. The lady working the register in the gift shop was a lifelong resident of the area. She claimed to witnessed most of the launches, and all the Apollo launches. She said the Saturn V launches were awesome -- the whole ground would shake for miles around like an earthquake as these rockets rumbled toward the Moon.

Fortunately, this cheesy "Spaceport USA" still included tour bus service onto the NASA center. This time, the bus passed through a security gate on the road, and the Administration Building was a mile or two on the other side of the gate. Security had tightened considerably!

As we rode in, I once again saw my old friend, the Vehicle Assembly Building, or the "VAB" as it is now known in the Anagram Generation. The VAB now had the American flag and Bicentennial logo that had been added in 1976. This 1995 tour was very unmemorable compared to the 1969 visit. I noticed a few things I had not seen before, like the famous countdown clock near the VIP launch-viewing bleachers. But the other changes left me astounded.

I was incredulous at the changes in the VAB area. In 1969, the Vehicle Assembly Building stood alone on a dry, dusty lot. Now, an entire city of buildings had sprung up around the VAB. The area was now a large complex, not just a lone monolith. It was very incongruous, almost surreal, not unlike the sight of old-style church from a bygone era, where a modern metropolis had grown up around it.

The tour included a stop near a Space Shuttle on the launch pad. The Shuttle still uses the same crawlers and launch pads developed for Apollo, and the Shuttles are still assembled in the VAB. On the tour, we saw one of the old crawlers lying derelict along the side of the road. KSC had become a sort of junkyard for the worn out relics of the Apollo program.

The bus let us off for a stop in a parking area near the VAB. Laying there on its side was an actual Saturn V rocket. This was no doubt intended to be either Apollo 18, 19 or 20, one of several Moon missions that never flew due to NASA budget cuts in the 70s. The poor rocket looked sad laying there, like some great space-faring whale washed up on a planetary beach.

This corpse of the Apollo program was a glaring reminder of the passing of NASA's golden age. And the extensive complex of buildings spoke as to what NASA had become. In the 60s, NASA had "The Right Stuff." It was lean and mean, and could send rockets 240,000 miles to the Moon with only one Vehicle Assembly Building. By the 90s, NASA had become a bloated government bureaucracy, and needed all these extra buildings just to send a couple reusable Shuttles into an orbit 120 miles above the ground.

The tour was now a nostalgic retrospective dedicated to the Apollo program. A new visitor center had been constructed on base, and the old Saturn V derelict was now fully taxidermized and restored to museum quality, and was hanging from the ceiling. The exhibits and movie venues told the tale of NASA's glory days, when the agency was setting new milestones each month, and inspiring a nation through otherwise difficult times.

There was a strong sense of history in the place, as though NASA itself was becoming a part of history. The Columbia disaster had happened that year. In post-9/11 America, the bus did not stop at all near the VAB, let alone to allow anyone inside. Here in the 21st century, one felt that NASA had largely become a relic of the past, with little role to play in the future.

Anyway Cameron, these are my recollections of Kennedy Space Center. Hope that answers your question!