To a generation for whom the term "moon walk" has far more to do with Neil Armstrong than Michael Jackson, a trip to Florida's Kennedy Space Center offers the chance to relive those heady days of space exploration, when everything seemed possible and each day saw science fiction changed to science fact.
2 Visitors to the space center should keep a few
facts in mind. Because this is a working facility, there's no such thing as unrestricted access -- tour buses ferry visitors through the NASA complex and keep to a fairly tight schedule.
And while NASA is more than happy to celebrate its past, it's even more concerned with the present and future. Throughout your tour, you'll find more attention paid to the space shuttle than Apollo 11; the gift shop is brimming with shuttle trinkets, while those for the Mercury and Gemini programs are relatively scarce.
One other note: Names around here can get confusing. The Kennedy Space Center is home to the space shuttle and has been used as the launching point for all of America's manned space missions since Apollo 8 on Dec. 21, 1968. The Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, across the Banana River from the space center, is situated on the Cape Canaveral peninsula. All the Mercury and Gemini missions lifted off from
Cape Canaveral, along with Apollo 7. It is still used to launch unmanned satellites.
In 1963, the Cape Canaveral peninsula was renamed Cape Kennedy, in honor of the man who vowed to put a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth, by the close of the 1960s. The Cape Kennedy name was rescinded by an act of the U.S. Department of the Interior and the state of Florida in 1973.
Your trip to the Kennedy Space Center begins at the visitor center, known as Spaceport USA. There, you can purchase tickets for one of two bus trips. The two-hour Red Tour takes visitors through the space center and includes stops near the space shuttle launch pad (where you may be lucky enough to see a shuttle waiting to blast off), the Vehicle Assembly Building -- at nearly 129.5 million cubic feet, one of the world's most massive buildings -- and a Saturn V rocket. Sitting on its side, the rocket is 363 feet long, with five massive engines at its base, each capable of producing 1.5 million pounds of thrust.
The Red Tour also includes a mock lunar landscape, complete with lunar module, and a re-creation of the mission control center television viewers became so familiar with in 1969.
