Fair warning - I started this post in October shortly after returning home from Orlando, and am finishing up now. Sorry if the tone doesn’t mesh all the way through.
— Begin October Snippet—
I’m having trouble deciding whether to do this in order of coolness, or in chronological order. There was a whole lot of stuff packed into the 5 days I was in Orlando, and ranking it could be difficult. So here it goes in the order that it happened since the last post (which was Monday.)
Tuesday we did a tour historic house in St. Marys, and then a little submarine museum as well. Orange Hall, as the house is called, was a beautiful place, and had some interesting design elements that you’d only find in the south (like adjacent bedrooms being open to one another to allow air to flow through. The museum was more of a collection of memorabilia, with some artifacts in tow. It was a jam packed little place, and had some interesting stuff and good information. Why St. Mary’s Georgia for a Submarine Museum? Kings Bay Submarine base is only a few miles away, and it’s where the trident capable fleet of Ohio Class subs calls home on the East Coast. I’d explain that, but you can just read this.
Then in the afternoon we head to Orlando. We get to our hotel, and from our 10th floor window, we’re looking out over the it’s ridiculously large parking garage and right into Universal Studios. That afternoon is the only one I did anything even remotely looking like work, and it was just to fix some e-mail issues on the DELCAPS site. That night I made a late airport run, and then slept up for Wednesday, which was Universal Studios for us.
Tickets for Theme Parks are insanely expensive. But when you see how much work they do to immerse you in a World, and the number of people it takes to actually run one of those parks, you can see why it costs that much. Universal is just as it was a few years ago, but the new Simpsons ride is quite impressive. And it was the first time I’d been in the Island of Adventures park, which has a few nice coasters on it. After that, I made another airport run (I’m too nice a guy, I swear) and then it was dinner at Maggianos. Now, I’d never heard of this place, but there’s a few around home, apparently. They have a family style dinner that puts a heck of a lot of food on the table. There were a lot of boxes that came back to the fridge in the hotel room. Everything I had was amazingly good too, and it was quite possibly my favorite meal of the trip.
Thursday was the NASA trip. The entire reason I was in Florida. Sure, there were lots of extra perks, but if the NASA trip wasn’t on the agenda, I probably wasn’t there (see my switch to California/Utah last year after this tour had to be canceled.) I’ve put up the pictures I took in the Gallery. Most of them from the trip now, but the KSC 2008 ones for sure. If you look at that Gallery and see the 45 pictures you might think to yourself ‘Wow, I’d expect a shutterbug like that guy to take a few hundred at a place like that’. That certainly was my intention. But, I can be an idiot sometimes, and ended up with two nearly dead camera batteries. And yes, my charger was with me. So there are 45ish pictures that I took. Luckily, everyone else had their cameras. I’d heard that this tour was the uber, the-public-can’t-get-this-without-connections tour. It was a tour with a dress code. The day started with a workshop, since the thing was put on by their education resource people. There were teachers in the group, and since Odyssey is definitely an education thing (in its own Out of the Box kind of way) that’s how we got in the door.
– End October Snippet —
Wow, stopped at the good part. Anyway, the tour went something like this after the workshop. We were let loose into the visitors center (the education center is like the rear entrance to the place) and got a chance to try out the Shuttle Launch Experience. NASA built a launch simulator with the help of the ride builders over at Disney, and it came off pretty convincingly. The rotate you past 90 degrees to really make you feel the blood rush to your head and simulate 3Gs against your body. After that it was a quick lunch and then onto the tour bus.
Now, two years ago when I was last at Kennedy, my mom and I did the uber public tour, and saw lots of cool stuff. This was an entirely different animal. It started out similarly - we went by the ISS processing center and saw the few modules that are still waiting to go to the space station - a number of them that I had seen two years ago are now in space, and they pointed out the cargo module that Endeavour just returned yesterday from delivering. That was where the similarity ended.
Then the tour took a very different path - one to the front door of the VAB. That’s the Vehicle Assembly Building. It’s basically a giant hangar for spacecraft. It was built for the Apollo program to assemble and prepare rockets and modules for the moon missions. Every launch that has occurred since Apollo has gone through that building. It’s quite possibly the most pivotal in US manned space flight history, though it probably has quite a competition from mission control in Houston. Oh, and when I say this building is giant, I mean giant. It’s a hangar 55 stories tall. To add some perspective, take a look at this shot:
That American Flag is painted on the side of the building. Each of the stripes on that flag is the width of an 8 lane highway. Imagine 13 I-95s next to each other. So yeah, it’s a big building.
Oh, I mentioned that we pulled up to the front door - but then we went inside. I’ve never felt so dwarfed in my entire life. Sure, we’ve all been in 55 story buildings at some point or another. There’s buildings that size and much higher in any major city. But have you ever been in one where you could stand on the ground floor and look all the way to the roof? The scale is absolutely mind boggling. That, coupled with the immense history that is entwined with the building is completely overwhelming. (This was also the moment I noticed that I had two nearly dead camera batteries, and kicked myself very, very hard.)
Next we headed out to the Launch Pads - I’d seen them, empty, and from a distance, two years ago. My heart nearly stopped as our tour bus went through the security gates, and onto the access road to the pads. Our bus was within a football field’s length of the pad, and there was Atlantis, awaiting a move back to the VAB, as its mission was scrubbed until March after Hubble developed problems in orbit. As you’ll see in the photographs, when the shuttles are waiting, and not near launch, they don’t look as cool as they do on TV - the entire orbiter is covered in super structure. You can’t see anything but the giant orange tank and the solid rocket boosters.
But there was more - since the Atlantis mission was to Hubble, and not to ISS, the new safety regulations put in place after the Columbia accident said that a rescue mission had to be ready and waiting on the pad. So there was Endeavour, waiting on pad 39B, 4.5 miles away. We got up and close to that too.
Then it was back to the gift shop for obligatory swag hunting, then back to the hotel. Quite frankly, I can’t remember at all what happened that night, probably from the overload of the NASA trip.
Friday morning we went out to a private Art Museum, the name escapes me at the moment, but it is one of the largest private collections of Tiffany Glass. Fascinating place, and unbelievably beautiful work done with that medium. That afternoon I met up with an Odyssey bud that’s an Orlando native at Epcot, and saw the sights and noshed around the Food and Wine Festival. While there I saw my first 3D interactive ‘puppet show’ - I know how they pull it off, but it was still quite impressive for something rendered in real time. Also did the newly improved spaceship earth, which had some absolutely remarkable and somewhat frightening facial recognition software at work.
Saturday started with the Orlando Science center, which had a few very interesting exhibits, including a traveling Titanic exhibit, as well as a complete collection of Norman Rockwell (I realize they may not sound like Science center type stuff) but I enjoyed myself. The only downside was that they were doing a special program for kids, so there were seemingly thousands of them running around the place, which makes it difficult to concentrate on exhibits. Then I met up with Sara, who I’d not seen in a long, long while, and we hung out and went to the Blue Man Group show at Universal. That was quite a spectacle. It’s almost impossible to explain though, so if you get the chance, go. I’d nearly forgotten it was part of the trip because of my preoccupation with the NASA tour. After that, Sara and I hung out till the wee hours catching up, and I got back to my hotel room at about 2 AM.
Then I got up at 6 to go to the airport to fly home. Yeah, that kind of hurt. All in all, it was a great trip. Learned a lot, caught up with friends, and had a great time. I think one of the more important things I learned is that if you get away from the parks, and the tourist trap schlock that is International Drive, Orlando truly has a lot of actual culture and learning to offer. I also learned to charge up camera batteries, even if you sure you charged them before you left.
Oh, and if you want to see more pics from NASA, my buddy Melissa put up most of hers at flickr, including one of her early shots of the day that I walked into the frame.
Wow that was long, and not what I was planning on writing about tonight. Guess that is still yet to come…
