The Right Stuff -Sunday, May 30, 2004 -1:19 am-
We went to the Kennedy Space Center today. The cape is about 100 minutes from where we're staying. Let me reiterate the stupidity of Floridian drivers and the DoT sign department. The Center is much reworked since my last visit. Unfortunately, the Then and Now tour was sold out by the time we arrived. The TaN tour takes you along the launch sites of the Cape Canaveral AFB where the US space program started. You visit the launch sites of the early test rockets as well as the Mercury and Gemini launches (You can't visit the Apollo launch pads because we shoot the shuttles off of them now). I took the tour when I was very little and enjoyed the hell out of it, so I would have liked to do it again. The basic ticket now includes a lot of cool stuff. You ride a bus out past the VAB and the 3 OPFs. Lemme tell ya, the VAB is HUGE. It's such a shame that it's out in the middle of nowhere with nothing to which to compare it. After moving past the OPFs, you go past Launch Control. You see the inside of Launch Control in every shot of NASA technicians hunched over consoles ever, but I had never seen the outside of it. As it turns out, the big blue clock isn't in front of Launch Control as the media makes it seem, it's really across the road by a pond. Both of the Crawler-Transports were parked in the same area. I was surprised to discover that the orbiter is not directly on the C-T. I had always assumed that the C-T and the platform with the mounting points for the orbiter were one piece. As it turns out, the mounting platform is a passive jig that the orbiter gets assembled onto. When it's time to move from the VAB to the pad, the C-T scoots under, lifts the jig and orbiter off it's stand, deposits the jig and orbiter and the pad, and takes off. The C-Ts look funny without their hats on. Eventually, you are deposited at a observation gantry about a mile from LC39-A/B. You walk up this observation gantry and can look all around at the surrounding area and see LC39-A/B as well as most of the pads at Cape Canaveral AFB. Suspended in the center of the gantry structure is one of the main engines from an orbiter. It extends through three stories of the gantry. The thing is god damn big and it's still dwarfed by the SRBs or an engine from a Saturn V. There's also some displays and a movie of questionable value onsite.
The bus next deposits you at the Saturn V Complex. This is quite new, and fairly cool. You first see a movie about the Russians launching Sputnik, the Gagarin. It leads into an overview of our Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, replete with funny footage of rockets falling down and blowing up, turning over and blowing up, stopping in mid-air and blowing up, and finally, not blowing up. The film does a wonderful job of making the space race interesting while not trivializing the science or the loss of human life involved. The next room is a re-creation of Launch Control as it was during the Apollo Program. The machinery on the set is the actual machines used during that period. It's a wonderful setup with the stations actually functioning and processing their way through a launch (Apollo VIII). The set it topped by three large screens showing footage of the launch timed to run with the events on the set. It was pretty god damn cool. Look at the launch of a Saturn V sometime. The first few feet after the main engines are the very fires of hell. Passing through another set of doors, you enter a theatre with a screen and a stage textured like the moon. A movie is shown about the first lunar landing (Apollo XI) accompanied by props moving around on stage. I never knew the landing of Apollo XI came so close to catastrophic failure. The telemetry from the Lunar Lander kept dropping out and then the computer threw Error Code 1202, shortly followed by Error Code 1201. The problem with these codes was that the engineers had considered the failure mode so unlikely that they'd never practiced it or worked up a response to it. The was further complicated by the fact that no one knew what Error Codes 1201,2 were and the documentation couldn't be found. Eventually, as the computer tried to smash the Lunar Lander into the rocks, the astronauts took manual control and landed somewhere else. I find it interesting that so much attention has been focused on Apollo XIII, yet no one seems to realize how close Apollo XI came to getting the crew killed. Outside of the theatres was an actual Saturn V rocket. The thing is motherfucking huge. No, seriously. It required the creation of the largest building ever built (by volume, record stands to this day) to house its assembly. It's amazing that so much had to work so hard to launch so little (the bit that made orbit accounted for <10% of the launch mass). Fun facts to know and tell:
- The Saturn V is composed of over two million individual systems, the most complex machine ever created at the time (by more than an order of magnitude, and this is before CAD, mind you)
- The only time a sound as loud as the launch of a Saturn V has been heard by human ears was the explosion of Krakatoa
- The sound of the Saturn V could be heard in New York
- The tracking, guidance, and control systems contained less processing power than a digital watch
- Stage I of a Saturn V burns 15 tons of fuel and oxidizer per second
- A Saturn V is the heaviest object ever to leave the surface of the earth
Upon arrival back at the Visitor's Center, there was still a lot to see. There was a mockup of the Orbiter to crawl around and an actual SRB/EFT combo to look at. More interesting to me was the Rocket Garden. In the Garden, many of the rockets from the space program stand about, as well as some of the capsules. It's amazing how tiny everything is. Having looked at the Saturn V, or hell, even the Saturn I-B, it's amazing the poor little Mercury-Redstone was able to lift a chimp, let alone a human. The Mercury-Redstone is so small as to be almost cute. I could probably wrap my arms more than half way around it's circumference. Mich is taller than the capsule. I can't believe they shot someone into space on it. Even the Gemini rockets are small, though those at least don't look like models. The difference between the Mercury-Redstone and the Saturn V is just staggering. Without the real benefit of computers, NASA went from making planes to putting people on the moon in 12 years. To do that, they went from launching a few tens of thousands of pounds, to launching more than 6 million pounds. That's one hell of a roman candle.
I guess that, more than anything else, is what struck me this time. Scale. The scale of things are impossible to relate to normal life, or even to each other. The buildings and machinery are immense beyond imagination but seem no larger than construction trucks due to the vast amounts of space in which they set. The program started out with a small rocket, it's capsule shorter than Mich, barely capable of pushing a man outside of the atmosphere and ended with a beast taller than two Statues of Liberty and wider than a city bus is long capable of launching three men out of our gravity well and three-quarters of a million miles to the moon. The difference in scale are too staggering to really put into words. All you can do is stare, awestruck.
writebacks...
shannon wrote
guess again.
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