Saturday 17th August – My new favourite museum

Today we went to the US Space and Rocket Centre which is operated by the government of Alabama and is next to the Redstone Arsenal. It opened in 1970 just after Apollo 12 and has a lot of the Apollo programme hardware as well as Space Shuttle and Army rockets and aircrafts. It is said to be the largest space museum as it has more than 1500 pieces. As you enter you see a space shuttle sitting on top of the rocket that launched it into space. We walked through the first display which talked about the space race, after we walked through this we ended up in the Astronaut training area. They have an underwater tank and zero gravity climbing walls as well as the simulators used for training. After walking through this exhibit we came out to the space shuttle again. It was called Pathfinder and we couldn’t find anything about it but later found out that it was the first ever shuttle built only it didn’t fly. It was made out of steel and wood to test the facilities that would be used to handle the real shuttles. It sits on an external tank with solid rocket boosters attached. There were a few displays on military technology then we went to watch a 3-D film about where we will go next in space which was ok but the one we watched about Hubble telescope in Washington DC was better. We then stopped for lunch and went to another film in the planetarium which was great but was a presentation by a scientist who was very enthusiastic and sometimes a little hard to follow but the planetarium show was great. The final room we went into had a display all around the Apollo missions, they had a mock up of the service structure’s red walkway to the White room and a Command Module from Apollo 16 which orbited the Moon 64 times. They also have the five Saturn V engines fired in the first stage of the rocket as it lifted off the pad. Interestingly they brought back so much moon rock on one of the missions it effectively added another person and a half to the weight. We played with all the exhibits we were able to and had a go at landing the lunar Module on the moon – we crashed a few times but finally got it right, then stood under the rockets as they were firing up, the noise was quite great but I don’t think the vibrations were representative. By the time we had finished walking around we had spent almost 8 hours there and we could have spent longer but they were closing so threw us out! It was great and I could probably go back tomorrow but we have to move on.