Thursday, January 16th

 Today we took a break from the craziness, and went to Cape Canaveral to the Kennedy Space Center.  Wow, what a place.  If you ever go, plan a whole day or even 2 days!  There is so much to see and do.  We rode a bus that took us near the launch pads.  Huge!  Saw the crawler which is the machine that takes the rocket out of the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) where they build it to the launch pad at a speed of less than 2 mph!  Inside, we saw an exact type of Apollo Rocket they took to the moon.  It was displayed in pieces in the Apollo Center.  Huge doesn't seem to cut it!  We learned a lot about the Apollo program, and how it was started by a challenge by President John F. Kennedy to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s.  It happened...July 20, 1969.  Neil Armstrong walked on the moon!  The Apollo Program ran from 1961 to 1975.  We saw the actual control room for the early Apollo Flights. Did you know, we are set to go to the moon again in the year 2020?!  

Next was the Space Shuttle Atlantis.  Its last flight was in July 2011.  Later, they put the Shuttle in one of the buildings at the visitor complex, and then completed the construction of the building around the shuttle.  Amazing!  I think it had gone on 33 flights.  The Space Shuttle is the world's first reusable spacecraft.  The Shuttle launches like a rocket, maneuvers in Earth's orbit like a spacecraft and lands like an airplane.  It takes the Space Shuttle only 8 minutes to accelerate to a speed of over 17,000 mph!  Garrett and I did a simulated rocket launch!  It was awesome.  Very fast (not literally), loud, bumpy, and and it shook us like crazy!!   Garrett looked pretty cute in his astronaut suit----me, not so much!  :)   We watched several films throughout the day that were extremely educational including an IMAX movie on the repairing of the Hubble telescope in 3D.  Great science day here!!!!             **Sara