Space Shuttle Atlantis, I'm Ready!

Tracking Down Endeavour

I’ve spent a lot of time lately researching Endeavour and how to get in a good position to see it and photograph it up close. During that time, I’ve relied on Twitter to do 99% of my research. There’s nothing like getting almost instantaneous feedback from a sampling of the local population about whatever you need to know.

Since I started tracking down Endeavour, I followed a ton of people on my Twitter feed who had anything to say about it. A large number of those people were huge space fans and some of them were groups or people from NASA. When it came time for Endeavour to be moved across town, it was a piece of cake to figure out what to do, given that I had a million pieces of information about what was going to happen.

During that time, I saw a tweet about there being an event put on by NASA where you could see Atlantis behind the scenes with just a handful of people. I signed up, but I didn’t think I had much of a chance. The other day, I got an email from NASA saying I was one of the lucky few! I couldn’t believe it! It’s like getting the golden ticket from a Wonka bar. Now on Twitter I’m seeing other people from around the country saying that they were selected as well and all I can think of is the scene from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where they’re announcing all of the winners from around the world.

Going Back to Florida

I had never been to Florida prior to last year. We have this USA map jigsaw puzzle that has an enticing picture of a Space Shuttle launching into space on top of the state of Florida. When we were trying to figure out where to go on vacation for last summer, my now six year-old immediately said “FLORIDA!” He said he wanted to see a rocket launch.

My wife did a lot of research and found that they did rocket launches on the first Friday of every month (I think). We thought we could try to see the final launch of Atlantis, but for some reason the timing didn’t work out for us. We settled on going the following month, August, to see the rocket Juno blast off.

When we finally arrived in Florida, it was probably about 150 degrees out and 200% humidity. Despite that, it was easily the best vacation we’d ever been on.

We actually went to Kennedy Space Center (KSC) for two days. When you buy admission into KSC, it gets you two days of entry in three. The first day, we thought we would check everything out because we didn’t have any time constraints like needing to be somewhere to watch a rocket launch. The second day, we wouldn’t be too stressed out to see stuff because we were going to see the rocket launch. One of the most eye-catching parts of KSC was the huge space-themed jungle-gym.

The first day we were at KSC, we only saw the main visitor’s center. They had a ton of cool stuff for us to see including a Space Shuttle.

The second day was the day of the big rocket launch. We woke up super early and drove out from the house that we rented which was probably an hour away. We took a bus from the main visitor’s center to the Apollo building. On the bus drive over, we saw the huge VAB building.

There was tons of cool stuff to see from the Apollo missions inside the Apollo building.

We went outside to find a place to watch the launch. It was really hot and humid, as it had been every other day on our trip, but despite that, my son was able to sit and patiently wait for the rocket to launch for several hours.

Before the launch, we saw an alligator swim right in front of us. Finally after a short delay the rocket was clear for launch.