9 January – Galveston

Up early for the 45 minute drive to Houston and the Johnson Space Centre, home to NASA.s Mission Control. As we parked up we could see the Shuttle transport plane with a shuttle replica mounted on its back.

 The complex is expansive, so the first thing we did was hop on a tram tour that takes you behind the scenes of the Space Centre. It has the look of a university complex, lots of fairly ordinary buildings, but housing NASA’s ongoing work. 

First stop was the historic mission control building, where NASA ran 9 Gemini and all the Apollo missions including the historic Apollo 11 trip to the moon and the final Apollo 17 trip. The control room has been restored with all its original fixtures and fittings and it was really interesting to sit in the press and VIP gallery and look out over the equipment. We learned that today's smart phones have enough processing power to run all of the Gemini and Apollo missions simultaneously and still have some processing power left over.

Next tour stop was the Saturn V warehouse. Massive, huge, unbelievably big – no words can really capture what it is like to be dwarfed by the Saturn V, the most powerful rocket ever built, and used for the Apollo missions. Over 36 stories tall, this is one of the original Saturn Vs and is kept in a climate controlled warehouse to keep it from deterioration. Even horizontal, its quite awe inspiring to look at. The 5 engines create 7.5 million pounds of thrust and chew through their 2200 tons of fuel in just 2 and a half minutes as they accelerate to 6500 miles an hour before Stage 1 was jettisoned. Stage 2 burned for 6 minutes before jettison, and at that stage the rocket was travelling at 15,000 miles an hour. Stage 3 put the final capsule into orbit at 17432 miles an hour.

After the tram tour we watched a short film introducing the history of the space program. Interestingly they didn’t shy away from the two shuttle disasters, but handled them very respectfully. It was very sobering to see the film from inside mission control as the Challenger disaster happened. The shock and sorrow was evident.

Next stop was the Starship Gallery with displays of the major types of capsules and modules used in the missions. There was a walk through of the training mockup of Skylab, and close up viewings of the Gemini, Mercury and Apollo modules. They didn’t give the astronauts much space!

Outside we climbed to the top of the Boeing with the shuttle on it’s back that we had seen when we arrived. We were able to go inside the shuttle and view the flight deck and payload bays and then inside the plane to see the many modifications made to transport the shuttle.

Following the shuttle display we went to the International Space Station section, which gave really interesting insights into life on the station.

Final stop was the movie Journey to Space, which recapped the space program to date, and also gave an in depth insight into the plans for Mars expeditions, planned for the mid 2030s using the new Orion spacecraft. Orion is the new deep space technology and has already commenced testing in 2014. The first mission will be unmanned and will go out past the moon, the second mission will follow the same path, but with a crew and the third mission will be to an asteroid in the 2020s.

After a full on day, we are back at camp on Galveston Island.