There has been no blog for a couple of weeks, because it was time for the Davies family annual holiday and this year we spent two fantastic weeks visiting friends in Houston, Texas. Last year's trip took us through much of the South of the USA, but this was our first trip to the Lone Star State and it very much lived up to expectation!
We squeezed in a lot, spending quality time with old friends, travelling up to visit Austin and San Antonio, travelling around the ranch of former President Lyndon B Johnson, attending both High School and College football games and even visiting Austin County Fair and Rodeo, which was a WILD eye opener!
But without a doubt, the thing which left the biggest impression on me, was what we left for last. On our final full day before flying home, we drove down to the South East of Houston and spent the day at the NASA Space Centre, somewhere I've wanted to visit for decades, and it did not disappoint!
What I loved most about the place was that it serves a dual purpose. Naturally, it's part-museum, full of exciting and displays about the history of NASA and space travel. Lots of artefacts, videos and interactive things which tell the story from the Mercury programme in the late 50s, through the Apollo programme in the late 60s and early 70s, right up to the Shuttle-Mir programme which was carried out in conjunction with the Russians in the 90s. Then, of course, you can learn all about the ongoing programmes, such as the International Space Station and the Commercial Crew programme which shuttles astronauts to and from the ISS. There are replicas of sections of the ISS which you can walk around inside, to understand the sort of space that they're living and working in, which is a bit of a mind-melter! You can even visit the historic mission control centre, which changed a lot over the many space missions it controlled, but has been restored to look exactly as it did when it oversaw the Apollo 11 mission and man's first visit to the moon!
Along, with this, however, the space centre is also part-workspace and there are active projects taking place right there in front of you! There's a chance to visit the Astronaut Training Facility, where you can view (from an elevated platform and behind a window) the space in which every NASA astronaut since 1980 has trained for their mission. The huge facility contains mock-ups of vehicles and modules of craft like the ISS, which act as a huge classroom. It's absolutely bizarre to be looking down at people who are preparing to go into space, moving around the building as if they're in a Costco warehouse! I guess when you're a spaceman, that's just what you do, but for everyone else looking on, it's incredibly cool!
The icing on the cake, however, is housed in a relatively nondescript hangar, which you visit on one of the tram tours around the huge site. I say nondescript; in actual fact there's a massive painting on the back side of the hangar which tells you exactly what's inside, but let's imagine for a second that you don't pay attention because you're distracted by the herd of Longhorn cattle across the road and approach the building from the front, where it looks like every crappy 60s/70s office block-type building we see all across the UK. It's got small, dirty windows, with rotting wooden frames and a door that looks like it was rescued from the fire exit of Laurencekirk Sports Centre when they demolished the place. But when you open it, you're first hit by the air conditioning (very welcome in Texas, where the normal temperature is two million degrees celsius, year-round) and then your breath is taken away. Inside this building, part of Rocket Park, there lies one of only three Saturn V rockets on display anywhere in the world!
I'm not a space geek; what's a Saturn V rocket, I hear you ask? I'm glad you did! Because whether you know anything about space or not, you will ABSOLUTELY have seen one of these before. The Saturn V was the launch vehicle designed by NASA as part of the Apollo programme. When you've seen those launch videos of Apollo 11 heading to the moon or Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks and Kevin Bacon using the covering page of a manual and a couple of old socks to stay alive (as well as Apollo 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 16 and 17), you're looking right at a three-stage Saturn V rocket, launching the astronauts from earth and breaking off to leave the Command Service Module (with the astronauts inside) to complete the rest of the mission and return to earth!
This particular Saturn V rocket, designated SA-514 was built for Apollo 18 or 19 which were both scrapped. As a result, it's been on display for a long time and was refurbished and put into this facility where you really get a sense of the scale of the whole project. The idea that a small group of people were effectively strapped to the top of this beastly rocket, 111m long and 10m in diameter and blasted into space is mind-boggling and it's impossible to stand right alongside it without being in awe of the feat of engineering and physics, as well as the bravery that it'd take to make something like that happen!
My photo, an example of the kind of world-class photography I'm famed for, gives some sense of the size of this thing, but it's remarkable to see it up close and I'd urge anyone who visits Houston to see if for yourself.
I went to the NASA space centre because I thought it'd be interesting. It was certainly that. But moreso, it's was inspiring! The sheer scale of things. The Years of work and thought and planning that go into the programmes. The amount of effort, of trial and error, of mistakes and heartache and loss that have been involved in space travel, all to try and better understand the universe, really opens your eyes to what can be achieved with a strong vision and a lot of hard work to realise it. Man hasn't set foot on the moon now in 52 years, but I was excited to hear all about Artemis Programme and the Orion Spacecraft which plan to do exactly that in 2025 and I know there's a whole new generation of young people, just like my daughter, who will see that happen first hand and be grasped by the idea that with the right approach, anything is possible!
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