{"id":6008,"date":"2017-11-09T13:41:58","date_gmt":"2017-11-09T18:41:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/?p=6008"},"modified":"2017-11-09T13:41:58","modified_gmt":"2017-11-09T18:41:58","slug":"johnson-space-center","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/09\/johnson-space-center\/","title":{"rendered":"Johnson Space Center"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Lobby<\/a>

Lobby with Lunar Lander mockup<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Apollo<\/a>

Apollo control room<\/p><\/div>

\"Mars<\/a>

Mars Rover<\/p><\/div>I used our day in League City to travel about 5 miles to the Space Center<\/a> museum, adjacent to the Johnson Space Center<\/a>. The Space Center is both a welcome center for tours of the Johnson Space Center and a museum containing some very interesting artifacts of US space exploration.<\/p>\n

When I got to the Space Center I immediately took a tour of the Johnson Space Center because I really wanted to see where our space program was based. I wasn’t disappointed. The 90-minute tram tour made 3 stops:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The “Historic Mission Control” center – the control room for the Apollo 11 mission to the moon and the first walk on the moon.\u00a0 This is where the “one small step for man” words were first heard.\u00a0 It is also the room where the Apollo 13 near-disaster was managed (see the Apollo 13<\/a> movie).\u00a0 It was smaller than I had imagined and, of course, the technology looked ancient.\u00a0 But it is a historic place and I am glad I got a chance to be there. It was also interesting to learn that the control room for the International Space Station – in communication 24\/7 with the astronauts on the ISS – was just down the hall.<\/li>\n
  2. The “mock up” building where mock-ups of current and future space vehicles are kept.\u00a0 The building currently houses a full-scale mock-up of the International Space Station, a prototype of the Martian Rover and several prototypes of trans-Mars modules. I was not aware that so much work was underway for a manned Mars mission. This building is used for training current astronauts – both those heading to the ISS and those training for a Mars mission – and for engineering solutions to problems that crop up in the ISS.\u00a0 This is also the building where solutions to the Apollo 13 problems were concocted.<\/li>\n
  3. The Saturn V building.\u00a0 This huge hanger houses an actual Saturn V rocket – one of the largest rockets ever built and the rocket that sent the Apollo missions to the moon.\u00a0 It is, of course, incredibly large.\u00a0 The fact that it exists at all after the termination of the Apollo program was a surprise to me.\u00a0 This particular rocket was the one that would have been used for the Apollo 18 mission, had that mission not been canceled.\u00a0 I doubt that a Saturn V exists anywhere else, so I was really thrilled to get to see this one.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The Space Center also had some interesting attractions:<\/p>\n