This adventure I'm completing today (I'm enroute as you read this, having composed it last night) had more to it than just Saturday's launch. I actually had some business to conduct yesterday at the Kennedy Space Center, and with this came access to some areas the general public doesn't get to go. This led to some fun, and also led to some of those moments that send chills up your spine. I'll take these moments from ridiculous to profound for you.
After my business was partially completed yesterday morning, I went with my companion (who played a key role in the whole thing) over to the Vehicle Assembly Building's parking lot, and we went over to the NASA cafeteria for lunch. When we got out, we noticed the tour buses were coming through, and people were getting out and taking pictures of the VAB from behind a fence. I grabbed my camera and turned it on the tourists:
After lunch (delicious vegetarian wrap, by the way, along with an official NASA cafeteria bag of Sabor de Soledad cheese puffs), we drove around the VAB and around the three Orbiter Processing Facility hangars (where the shuttles live while they're on the ground), then went over to the KSC headquarters building and hung out in the library, then stopped in at the "company store" for a minute. Then over to the vehicle depot for the rest of our business; the guy who invited me on the base is really pushing alternative fuels, and has a "smart car" he uses sometimes, a plug-in hybrid. Next thing I know, I'm getting the chance to drive the thing around, and it's a lot of fun. (I want one!)
After that, we had the chance to freelance the rest of the afternoon, and we took off down the road that parallels the crawlerway that the launch vehicles are rolled out on. Here's a view of the VAB, and the picture doesn't do it justice to just how big the thing is:
Our path took us parallel to the crawlerways, and past where Saturday's fun happened, Pad 39A:
Our next stop was a place that's as close to a shrine as any place in the space program. Anyone who knows the history of spaceflight knows about Launch Complex 34. It was there, during the closing stages of a plugs-out test on the evening of January 27, 1967, that Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were killed in a fire aboard the Apollo spacecraft they were to have taken into orbit a few weeks later. Pad 34 is quiet and deserted now, but its silence speaks volumes, and its desolation is somehow eloquent.
Next stop was a place that, once upon a time, was the focus of the eyes of all in the free world. Launch Complex 14 is most remembered as the place where John Glenn was sent into orbit aboard Friendship 7 in February 1962. It was the site where it would finally be shown that the Americans could equal the Soviets, and before the eyes of all. Now it, too, sits quiet and abandoned.
Then it was on to Launch Complex 19. This is where the Gemini missions were launched, and the last four decades haven't been kind to 19, but there's still remnants there of yesteryear's spacefaring culture:
Time got away from us, so we weren't able to get down to the old Mercury-Redstone launch site before the museum closed; the best I could manage was a long, so-so telephoto shot down the abandoned access road, but I got to see it.
Monday was pretty profound for me, on several levels. I grew up a space nerd, and it seemed so many of the things in which I was interested happened at KSC. I devoured as many of the books as I could when I was younger. The early astronauts were like knights in this Camelot of spaceflight I envisioned, and I grew up wanting to fly these wonderfully complicated vehicles into the unknown with the same daring they did. Over time, my view of the men themselves grew considerably more complicated (and, happily, their achievements were joined by the efforts of many noble women who proved gender need not be a barrier to exploring space or flying spacecraft), and I understood better the political implications behind what they were doing and why they were doing it, but it didn't diminish my fascination one bit, nor my reverence for the whole thing.
I spent my youth, and I've spent much of my adult life, reading about all the things that have happened here, picturing these places in my mind's eye. Yesterday, I got to see them for myself, and it was pretty amazing. I can't find the words to describe it, but I'll never forget how it was, and I'll always be grateful.
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