NASA Marshall Space Flight Center

I make no apologies for my love of science, especially the space program. So, this wasn't a matter of if, but when...

But even if the time was right, I wasn't about to just show up and expect my kids to get it. Nope. As I've said before, I'm not above stacking the deck to win. So, we had a couple pizza & movie nights before the trip to watch Space Camp (1986) and Space Warriors (2013). Needless to say, Naomi & Danielle were pretty stoked to see this when we showed up...

"It's real!"

Not to mention this!

Of course, once they're hooked, it's time to reel em in and learn about my favorite part, the heyday of NASA, project Apollo.

Marshall actually has two full size Saturn V rockets. The one inside is an authentic leftover from the Apollo days. It's housed in the new Davidson Center, which chronicles the earliest days of the space program (pre-NASA) all the way thru the moon landings and America's first space station, Skylab.

Back then, Marshall's role within NASA was the development of the rockets themselves. And they have quite an impressive collection of em on display, including alot of the incremental ones used before Apollo. (ya know, the ones that often blew up on the pad) (well, not these thankfully) Interesting to see the progression from the tiny unmanned "missiles" to the Redstone which carried Alan Sheppard into space (and wasn't much bigger than a missile itself).

These days, the Huntsville Operations Support Center at Marshall supports the International Space Station along with the Kennedy and Johnson Space Centers. And in a back-to-the-future way, they're also once again hard at work on the Space Launch System (SLS) to send the Orion capsule to space in the next decade.

Ad Astra!