Since we were flying through Houston on our way back from Costa Rica, we planned to stay a couple of days to go to the Houston Space Center, and that was time very well spent.
We roamed around the exhibits a little bit before our level9 tour:
hard to imagine this folded and fit under the lunar lander
Then, we started our level9 tour: it's a private tour for 12 people showing many out of bounds area up front and personal, it was awesome.
I love those signs :)
Our tour started with the Saturn V rocket, and yes, it's big :)
this piece on top of the rocket is supposed to take off and take the top module with it if the rocket fails at takeoff
2nd stage
1st stage + 2nd stage
inside of 3rd stage
Next, we went to their big swimming pool where astronauts train:
From there, we went to Mission Control Center for the space station (ISS) and got some explanations from someone working there and on his break:
the zoom on my camera came in handy :)
The next part, which was super cool is that we were allowed to go in the actual mission control center used to put man on the moon:
I guess they didn't have Email yet :)
I fixed the squawk code on their console :)
The nice gentleman who took time off his break to give us a tour
I need to change my job title to this :)
We then went to see the new mission control center that will replace the old one:
I'm glad to see they use 4 LCDs like me :)
Last on our tour was their lab where they build new stuff:
copy of Soyuz for training
We then used the remaining part of the day to see parts of the museum, and came back the next morning to finish it:
one twin stays on the ground, one goes to space, and they'll compare changes after one year
impact testing
nuclear propulsion would be good
one astronaut gave us a talk
And that was it for our tour of Houston Space Center, it was plain awesome.