3 July 1993. After driving around International Drive to get to Sea World, we took the easy option of a bus tour to Kennedy Space Centre the following day.
First stop was at the independantly run Hall of Astronauts. Here were lots of displays of space suits and some of the early capsules. There were some tableaux also of the lunar surface, with actual moon buggies displayed, although none that had actually gone to the moon, as none were brought back. It was dark in there so all our photos ended up blurred - we weren't sure whether you were supposed to take photos to be honest and no one else seemed to loosing off flashguns so we tried to be discreet!
There was an early capsule that you could sit in. Definitely not for the claustrophobic! Gillian took some convincing but eventually tried on a space helmet. She complained afterwards she thought it felt "stupid"! Well, to be honest it was sitting on her head instead of resting on the shoulders of a space suit so whilst I didn't say so at the time, yes Gill... it did look a bit stupid... But there were plenty of others looking stupid so it's alright! Some of them didn't even need a space helmet...
We went on the Shuttle to Tomorrow - a full sized space shuttle that was in fact a simulator. We all got strapped in and put on stereo headphones. Only one ear worked on mine and I could hear all the "oohs" and "ahhs" of the other passengers...and the creaky old machinery doing all the jiggling the floor about...
But now we are off to the actual Kennedy Space Centre and the Rocket Garden. It's a sad fact but actually whilst a space ship of the type in sci-fi films would be dead good, a space rocket is actually a pretty boring piece of kit. Too big to look over in detail and a space engine is just nothing like any other kind of engine so just looks like a mass of pipes and inverted funnels sticking out. I found it hard to get into the spirit of it.
We did a bus tour to the launch pads - well... to a close enough distance to tell there was a space shuttle being prepared, if you had 20/20 vision and a pair of binoculars. The bus driver had a good line in patter though and was quite amusing and because there were three of us I found myself sitting next to a stranger. She was a 15-year-old girl from Arizona who was only too keen to chat, especially after I pointed out a buzzard who was circling us, waiting for the bus to break down.
She thought it was "really neat" that we were from England and said that although they were used to the heat, the Florida humidity was wearing. The space shuttle that we saw on the launch pad was due to blast off a couple of days after we returned to England. We felt somewhat better though when something went wrong and the launch was delayed another few days! Imagine going out all that way to see it only for some technician to look bewildered at a button and say "Well... it ought to work..."
