Houston was the first word transmitted from the surface of the Moon: “Houston, the Eagle has landed” and we went to the Space Center Houston and the NASA displays there. It’s a madly popular tourist site, of course. The Mission Control Centre tour has you seated in the very chairs that family and dignitaries would have sat in for these early significant space events. In fact, we were asked to be reasonably quiet as another control centre (presumably much, much more modern) was functioning on the floor below. It's a strange combination of old and new. These are not new buildings and the lift wasn’t functioning so we’d climbed stairs to the old MCC. It’s as I remembered, having watched the Apollo 11 landing one schoolday afternoon (showing my age!). All old CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) screens and the like. Otherwise a fairly obvious display area (maybe I know too much of this topic?) but a fabulous unused Saturn 5 lying in state on its side in its massiveness and a Gemini capsule on a stubby test rocket and a Mercury Capsule on Redstone, a diminutive vehicle for those first suborbital flights and, they suggested, essentially a V2. Thanks Werner von Braun! Otherwise a visit to a space shuttle mounted on a 747. I had seen one of these, perhaps this one, on tour of Europe, flying over Rome, before the first Shuttle launch. So many memories and much that I knew but had not experienced so intimately. Other than standing under a Saturn 5 engine cone once in a science museum or that Gemini capsule in David Jones Adelaide on tour of the world, sometime back then.
NASA Space Center Houston, Apollo's Mission Control Center and a museum display of Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Saturn 5 and more is in Houston.
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