|
A Journal on a visit to
Florida |
| On two
occasions, I visited Florida. The first was primarily to see around the
Kennedy Space Center. I took notes on the trip as I travelled. An edited
version was published in Spaceflight magazine. Here is the full version. |
|
|
|
Day 1 - Friday 11th 0915 GMT, 0415 EST. And the bleary eyed trip over the ocean. It transpires that the flight stops at Bangor, Maine where we will pass through the US customs procedures. I really miss not having a window seat, and am annoyed at the petty thought that the old gentleman to my far left, not only has that position, but appears to have little interest in the stark beauty to be seen outside. I am aware that I will visit the Space Center soon but just now I‘m not as excited by it as I would normally be. I think the prospect of another 11½ hours on this ‘plane and the fact that my thigh muscles already feel cramped, is slightly dampening my anticipation. I‘ll be happier when I get out of this aisle seat and into the Florida sun. 1100 GMT, 0600 EST. Thigh cramp gone, breakfast over (not bad) and I‘m halfway across the Atlantic just south of Iceland. There‘s a queue for the bog and the film is just beginning. I chose not to spend £2.50 for a pair of airline headphones so I won‘t be able to hear it. I have plenty to read with me and I don‘t particularly need a second set of ‘phones. From what little I can see through partially iced up windows, the cloud cover appears to be extensive over the ocean. I have reconciled myself to my aisle seat with the knowledge of having plucked up the courage to ask for a visit to the flight deck. I hope I can come up with a few decent queries for them. Someone packed a bag in front of mine in the luggage rack so I‘ll not be bothering to take out my camera for the tour. We are supposed to be landing in Bangor at 1450 GMT, about an hour for customs (takes us to 1600) and 2½ hours to Orlando makes 1830, say 1900 GMT arrival (which is 1400 EST). That would be about 2 hours early of our planned 1555 arrival. 1150 GMT, 0650 EST. So that‘s the flightdeck of a 757. Two highly qualified guys sitting for hours on end, systems monitoring. The degree of control available to them, and the level of instrumentation they have, to inform them about their surroundings, is impressive though. High quality CRT displays abound (EFIS - Electronic Flight Information System) and a weather radar to boot (probably obligatory these days), describing the progress of the flight as the computers take us part way around the world. The ‘plane will even land itself if they want it to and all they would have to do is deploy the flaps and lower the gear; unless they want some practice. I spoke to the co pilot who made minimum effort to engage any more than polite conversation. To put it pointedly, he was bored. The captain, who was huddled over charts, never said a word while his control wheel rocked from side to side as if steered by a ghost. As one with poor social skills at the best of time, I didn‘t stay long; I introduced myself, asked my questions and thanked them very much. What a change from Mr �Enthusiasm‘ McTaggart. I can imagine some of my colleagues giving a similar welcome to visitors on tours of VT, betraying their inner disdain for a job that has changed from the one they joined up to. 1400 GMT, 0900 EST And I caught my first glimpse of North American land a few minutes ago. I presume it was Newfoundland. A complex coastline appeared with many islands and inland lakes. Now cloud again hides the view with only snatches of land visible at any one time. Less than an hour to Bangor. I‘ve just caught sight of reflections from waterways which are �scribbled‘ over the land in a semi-intelligent fashion. And now the skies are clearing as we cross from land to sea past a long, plain coastline which sweeps away to our left into distant cloud. Customs and immigration forms are filled in and I‘m ready for the next stage of this journey. 1530GMT, 1030 EST. Maine is a word that is short for miles and miles of trackless conifers. A fresh looking sunny day disguises a temp of 3 degrees. We‘re north still, and therefore November still holds its familiar meaning. The airport appears to double up as an air force base with five KC-135s apparent as well as a display in the transit lounge celebrating Desert Storm. The huge terminal building is nonetheless spartan though clean. It is functional and appears to exist for its own sake as a stopover rather than to service any large metropolitan centre. I hope I don‘t miss the call for the final leg. I did not; but the thickness of the announcer‘s accent and the speed of their speech did make it barely discernable. Anyway, all I had to do was follow the Geordies! 1208 EST, 1708GMT. Looking to my right across the aisle, past three other folk, I got a nicely framed view of Manhattan Island sitting within New York. Tiredness has tried to place the weight of a headache on my head but two paracetamol at Bangor seems to have lifted that prospect. It would seem we will arrive in Orlando an hour early, which will give me more time to get my bearings. I‘m sitting eight rows from the front on the left side of the aisle. There is not a cloud to be seen on the right over New York state while on the left, little fluffy clouds can be seen in the distance over a sunlit blue sea. As we follow the coastline south west, it weaves below us, now appearing out my nearest window as a great long beach; very narrow, stretching for many tens of miles with huge inland lakes just on the landward side. This trailing spit of land gives way to a wide estuary (Chesapeake Bay) and beyond that, the spit continues a solitary line away out to sea. (North Carolina). A vast trail of smoke comes into view and I am surprised at its size considering it appears to come from burning fields. The pilot informed his passengers of the weather at Orlando and as he let slip the temperature as being "in the eighties", a murmur of appreciation rose from the body of the kirk. 1847 EST, 2347 GMT. Culture shock is not quite the right word for it. Driving on the turnpike is fine (though I did not follow the correct route per my instructions for which I blame the poor road signs) but the town roads quickly cause information overload as you try to filter the useful signs from the wall to wall advertising. Actually I did not bad. When leaving the ‘plane, a smart monorail shuttles you from the aircraft‘s gate to the terminal. There, I tried to take an escalator down. It went down alright. Two floors! Retraced my steps and tried again successfully to catch the bus which ran me to the car rental depot. The outside air was as humid as you would ever get in Scotland, and as warm, but at the Alamo depot, I was happy enough to stand in the indoor queue as it was well air conditioned. After a half hour wait, I got the car papers, cashed a $50 traveller cheque and drove away in a very nice Mitsubishi Mirage. The smile really got onto my tired features when, in no time, I was driving down the BeeLine past signs above the road saying "Kennedy Space Center". $1 and 20¢ was required at the tolls for the Beeline and this gave me problems not knowing what the size of the various coinage was. As I made my way to Merritt Island over the causeway, I caught a glimpse of the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB). I felt, at last, that I really had arrived. |
|
2053 EST, 0153 GMT  I was pleased that I found 18 Brandy Lane alright. Annette Johnson's Mum
and sister showed me around the little timber framed bungalow and invited
me to make myself at home. The house has stone floors, wooden walls and
despite its temporary or pre-fab appearance from the front, it is
beautifully kept inside. I braved the roads again to search out something
to eat, stopping at a fast food place called Dennys. A pleasant, jokey
middle aged woman showed me to a seat at the counter. Her patter matched
her black skin colour perfectly. All the other staff were dressed in
uniform shirt and trousers except one, a blonde girl with worn out good
looks, skin been out in the sun too often and she wore black trousers, a
tight black waistband which went up to her stomach. Two black shoulder
straps went over a white blouse and to either side of her full bust and a
tie was tightly tucked in the middle. She could not have better called
attention to herself. My reaction was to be surprised at what seemed to me
a clumsy attempt to attract business, presumably explaining why the place
was full of old men. Less than $7 got me a meal and a coke. Very
reasonable. Slept well
after a short evening watching the dire TV channels. They are even worse
than I imagined. The car adverts with the chatty salesmen are the worst. |
Day 2 - Saturday 12th The
brilliance of the sun startled me as I left the house and the soft warm
humidity of the air was a pleasant alternative to the cool, air
conditioned atmosphere of Annette‘s home. Avoiding complicated driving
manoeuvres, I drove straight up highway 3 which became deserted as I
eventually passed a gate house with a Mercury/Redstone rocket welcoming me
to Kennedy Space Center, a restricted area. I was at first unsure if I
ought to be driving here. A notice invited me to tune into an AM station
for tour info. That made me feel better. The road, a four lane highway,
just kept going until I did a left and saw a space shuttle (not a real
one) showing that I had arrived at Spaceport USA. It was just after 10 in
the morning and the next 7 hours would bring me to a long dreamed of place
of pilgrimage. As one has come to expect, Americans had organised things
well and I quickly bought tickets for the Imax theatre and the red tour,
both of which gave me times in the day when I would go to them. This is
neat as it meant I didn‘t have to queue and I could go and see something
else for a while. First off, the gallery of spaceflight. I
was pleased to see the Apollo spacecraft from the Apollo/Soyuz mission,
and also Gemini 9 and an unmanned Mercury test craft. They were well
presented and I could go right around them. Apart from very small areas,
they were completely encased in shaped sheets of perspex. I understand why
this is done but it does form a barrier to one‘s desire to touch and
understand more about these spacecraft. The Apollo spacecraft had its door
open and that too was shielded but the hinge arm that supported the door
was not. It‘s funny how people have this urge to touch the things that are
of personal importance to them.1140 EST, 1640 GMT. I was told by one of the couple I'm sharing the house with that for him, Imax alone was worth going 3,000 miles for. Now I know what he meant. I don't like abusing superlatives so I will say that the film brought me to tears at one point and smiles throughout. I didn't expect much from Imax. I got more than I even hoped. They cut to a shot of the vehicle at the tower, filling the screen while all you hear are the  atmosphere
of the cape around you. You see the shower of sparks that spray the bells
of the rocket motors and you think "They‘re going to light this." It
lights and as thrust is built up, you see the whole stack lean forward
from the power. The SRBs light and off it goes. No music; no technical
chatter or naff sound effects; no narrator abusing more superlatives. A
launching shuttle needs no such ancillary froth. Is 'awesome' too
hackneyed a word?Next I climbed aboard a bus for the red tour clutching a bottle of drinking water (which was mostly ice) to keep myself from being dehydrated in the heat. Here we go to the launch pad. The tour was OK. Perfect for the tourist but I yearned to be left there for a while. I mean I loved it. I stood through a pale imitation of an Apollo countdown in one of the old buildings where the simulators used to be.  Knowing
the role the simulators played in the success of the venture I would have
found a display of the equipment in which people like Mike Collins honed
their skills to be of greater interest. Having just watched the huge and
detailed splendour of launches as seen by Imax, the countdown simulation
came across as being weak.In an adjacent room they had a CSM and LM, both claimed as being flight worthy examples, not mock-ups and I attempted to take photographs...  ...then we were rushed to the VAB and shown a crawler/transporter up close...  ...then on to the pads.  Now housed within its own display building, the Saturn 5 used to sit outside for 20 years They drove past 39B then onto a camera platform on a little hillock between A and B where we stopped for 5 minutes for photos. I could look over to 39A, where Apollo 11 nad gone from. I was impressed but lacked time to think; to consider where I had got to. An event happened here that was a defining moment in my life and I'm so busy running around trying to take photographs and getting Fred Bloggs to take one for me that I couldn‘t find time to let my spirit take its own path for a while and imagine. This hectic state of affairs was repeated at the VAB next to the Saturn 5. I did steal a thimbleful of time here and appreciated the chance. I shall return. |
|
Day 3 - Sunday 13th Went to the airport and couldn‘t open the gate. Maybe go for a run and see if they are open when I get back. Drove for a good bit down Merritt Island and back and nothing had changed at the airport so I sat in the car wondering what to do next. Meanwhile a carful of family pulled up, emptied out and walked straight through the gate. Now I know it‘s open so having locked the car I also go to the gate. Solid. Hmm... I try a really big heave and it swings open without difficulty; the place had been open all the time. I‘ve booked a couple of hours on each of Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Having done that, I drove off up to KSC and got myself into the Imax theatre again, this time to watch 'Destiny in Space'. I had less than 20 minutes before the start of the show yet I absentmindedly bought a sizeable lunch and suddenly realizing with 8 minutes to go that I had hardly started eating, I got tore in. The usher let me take my apple in when I promised not to eat it. I love Imax. This is the greatest cinema format. Outstanding flights across the surface of Venus and Mars, generated by computer. Footage of the deploy of the Hubble Space telescope, and its subsequent repair. These scenes are given an immediacy and, in the case of shots that depict motion, a terrific sense of movement by virtue of the detail and the enormous field of view they supply the brain. Later, I searched out the Astronaut Hall of Fame. A mock up of the shuttle was sat outside. Named 'Shuttle to Tomorrow' it contained rows of reclined, plastic seats laid out aircraft style in its payload bay area. A pair of headphones each and a powerful speaker built into the seat give the punter a 'multimedia experience' of a shuttle ride to tomorrow with Celestial Space Lines! Tackiness to the point of embarrassment. I can believe that kiddies (or Americans) will love this but it leaves a seasoned space nut like me cold. On next to the museum itself. Much of this lived up to the rather superficial and glitzy nature of the KSC visitor centre but was redeemed by having a super collection of artefacts from various missions. They also included a Space Shuttle Simulator which was a PC type flight sim where you used a joystick to land the shuttle from a few thousand feet up. I was chuffed when the machine congratulated me on an excellent landing and queried whether I had done this sort of thing before. On returning back to Brandy Lane, I met Annette Johnson for the first time. |
|
Day 4 - Monday 14th Tropical storm Gordon has conspired to force the landing of Atlantis to California so there was little point in getting up early as originally planned. It‘s windy outside and luckily I have no flying planned for today either.
1034 EST, 1554 GMT.I‘ve just watched Atlantis land on TV at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Time to go shopping. I still have to work hard to get around these streets for any but the simplest of journeys, especially when trying to go somewhere in particular. It is the dual work of trying to read amongst the confusion of signs and concentrating on driving correctly. Still, after some searching I‘ve found myself at the Merritt Island Shopping Mall. I found a bookshop which had an excellent range of science books including a couple which I bought, about JPL and about the Shuttle. (JPL — Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Specialist NASA department which sent Viking to Mars and the Voyagers to the outer planets.)
1722 EST, 2222 GMTUnlike one‘s usual impression of Florida, the sky is heavy, overcast and as the evening draws in, there is, and has been, little light to take photographs. I took the Blue tour this afternoon to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and has the great pleasure of visiting the blockhouse, control room and launchpads where America‘s first satellites and astronauts were launched; where great figures like Werhner von Braun, Kurt Debus and the other historic names from spaceflight pulled off fabulous events. I enjoyed this visit and wished it hadn‘t occurred under such oppressive skies.
Part of me doesn‘t quite accept that I‘m here whereas deep down I‘m having a ball. I keep catching myself walking around with my head as high as my spirit, my breathing as clear as my mind. Either this place is good for me or I am being pulled along by the wonder and enjoyment of being here.
The first manned missions were controlled from the Cape rather than from Houston as they are now. At last NASA was showing us something close up that was real and historic. Less of the poor imitations. Mission Control for the Mercury flights is just as it was and the blockhouse is full of equipment of the age. This is to spaceflight what Kitty Hawk is to air flight. If time allows, I‘m going to go back on the red tour and do a little less photography and a little more thinking.
2319 EST, 0419 GMT.While at the shopping mall this morning, I happened upon a bookshop and was glad to find a couple of titles worth adding to my collection, one of which, a history of unmanned probes, is proving to be a stimulating and hard hitting read. The weather is deteriorating. High winds and intermittent heavy rain look like they will scupper my plans for a flight tomorrow.
|
Day 5 - Tuesday 15th1010 EST, 1510 GMT.If I want weather like this I can go to Scotland for it. This isn‘t just a shower. It has been pouring solidly at least since I got up an hour ago and I‘m meant to be flying at one o‘clock. Went round to the airport and met Glen, the instructor. Fair haired chap with the standard loopy sense of humour and a rounded southern droll to his talking. He talked to me a lot about air space restrictions in Florida including KSC and an area on the chart known as the grey area. This cuts right across Florida and is the area, or more precisely the volume of air space used to test cruise missiles. I also received a demonstration of the twenty or so TV channels available including an all day weather channel and NASA Select/CNES, a channel which gives 24 hour coverage of the space shuttle during a flight, and of the federal government at other times. Neat. By about 3, I got fed up waiting and knowing, courtesy of the weather channel, that things were not going to improve. I drove out to US1 and up towards Titusville where I came across the Valiant Air Command museum at the Space Center Executive Airport. This was lovely. Beautifully restored planes ranging from an early string and wood replica from the 1910s, through an L-4 Grasshopper (J-3 Cub) and a Tiger Moth to a SkyFury, C-47 and a Provider. The provider had a history as one of the two aircraft used in the Iran/Contra affair. One of the staff, a talkative chap whose word per minute count matched his waistline, gave me a guided tour of the exhibits, explaining where they came from and some of their history. My ears ####### up when he pointed out the tubular steel skeleton of an Avro Anson brought from Strathallan, England! I corrected him on his British geography. I took a whole bunch of photos still wishing there was a bit more light available. Day 6 - Wednesday 16th Slept in a bit, then straight round to the airport despite knowing that there was no possibility of flying, thanks to the wind and rain of Tropical Storm Gordon. Day 7 - Thursday 17th Didn‘t get to fly yet again. Up at 7am and off to the airport for eight, as was Annette. Cloud was very low and no one was flying. Read my book on JPL in the meantime and at about 11am, the other pair staying at Annette‘s, Tim and Tat (Tatiana) showed up. A bunch of ROTC students also showed up and were given aircraft experience by being taxied or in some cases flown around the circuit at low altitude. Their patter was fun to listen to. About 12 noon, Tim + Tat got fed up and invited me to join them on a drive to the Piper aircraft factory at Vero Beach. This meant about a 40 mile drive south through Melbourne and a chance to see a greater expanse of the country while leaving someone else to do the driving. The incredibly flat nature of the country, the incessant parade of advertising signs and the ill defined delineation of one town from another does make this landscape dreadfully samey. All along the route, water appeared to always be vying with the road for land space and while this was partially due to tropical storm Gordon, the main reason was the ground‘s apparent tendency to never rise above about 4 or 5 feet above sea level. We passed through Micco where two nights previously a tornado spun up by tropical storm Gordon had coursed through a development of mobile homes, destroying hundreds of them and killing one person. A few pickups and trailers were parked along the roadside with the flimsy remnants of somebody‘s home heaped in the back. We got to Piper‘s HQ at Vero Beach airport only to find that factory tours had been halted three years before due to the company going into receivership. Nevertheless Tim + Tat bought me lunch at the airport restaurant. Three good sized lunches, coke, coffee and an orange juice for $10.49. It was amazing value. When we returned to Merritt Island, it was raining and nothing doing. So here I am at Dennys and feeling a bit happier. After getting her to phone me back, I had a good long conversation with Anne on the phone this evening and that is always enough to make me feel good. Didn‘t like Dennys much the first evening I came here but I‘m warming to it. Not long to go.
Day 8 - Thursday 18th1240 EST, 1740 GMTThis is a bittersweet moment. I take off for home in less than 4 hours and in the last 2 hours the sun has come out with a vengeance. I am at the Kennedy Space Centre basking in the sunshine and writing.
Flying over the KSC Visitor Center on my way to the Shuttle landing facility. The sun hadn't come out yet! I got up at seven, was at the airport for eight and was flying at last with instructor Bob Conner in Cessna 152 N47126 where the cloud was overcast at 1000 feet. Once we got up and had done some turns, Bob arranged on the radio for me to fly to the space centre and along the shuttle landing facility.
I therefore got to fly an aircraft at 600 feet altitude along the entire length of the runway that the Space Shuttles land on. That was a real highlight for me. At the end of the flight Bob got me to land (a bit heavily but Bob said not to worry about that). Back at the club, Tim + Tat arrived for some flying and soon after, I was astonished when the cloud seem to vapourise in about a quarter of an hour and the day was beautiful. I have said my goodbyes now and I‘ve just made a final visit to the Space Centre to see the VAB, the rocket garden, Gemini 9 and the moonrock. I need another week. I could stay here forever. Get a job. Get involved. I‘ve visited the home of the Saturns and touched Apollo.
0038 EST, 0538 GMTAt this point I‘m probably somewhere over Ireland and the plane had just started bucking like a horse. The drive from the Space Centre along the Beeline to Orlando was particularly enjoyable. I had got my flight at Merritt Island after all, the sun was brilliant but the air was perfect. My little car was humming along flawlessly and the radio station I had latched onto during my stay, WMFE, was playing an unknown but beautiful cantabile and my window was wound down in a final attempt to get even a shade of a suntan. In a sense, that final visit to Kennedy was very important and it left me content with my pilgrimage and its results. The book I‘ve been reading while sitting out the storms, and which I finished in the early stages of this flight, describes a fictional beast lurking somewhere out in the Solar System, known as the Great Galactic Ghoul which is made responsible for otherwise unexplained losses of interplanetary probes many millions of miles from Earth. I‘ve had a similar feeling about this trip to America in almost all aspects except KSC itself. First, Anne couldn‘t come, then I didnt get a window seat on the way over. Tropical storm (now hurricane) Gordon forced shuttle Atlantis to land in California while simultaneously wiping out my flying (to say nothing of 1,000 homes in Micco, near Melbourne), and when I get to the return flight home and get a window seat, it has to be in the smoking section and it is all fogged up. I can hardly see a darned thing out of it! After we drop off most of the passengers in Newcastle, I intend to find somewhere better to sit when it will be getting light anyway.
0249 EST, 0749 GMTWell, that was a hoot. I‘m at Newcastle and after all the English passengers had disembarked, it was discovered that the baggage in the hold did not tally with the number of passengers on the aircraft. All the Glasgow bound baggage was laid out on the soggy tarmac in a neat row and all the passengers, at least one from each family, had to go down one set of steps, point out his or her suitcases, pushchairs, holdalls etc to the baggage handlers, and return to the plane up another set. I‘ve changed seats to one with a clear window, the daylight has returned and we‘re just about to set off for a 30 minute hop to Glasgow. Including my long awaited jaunt over the Kennedy Space Centre this morning, this will be my fourth flight today. Copyright (c) David Woods 1994 Last updated 2004-10-22 |
The rocket motor from an example of Wernher von Braun's A-4 (V-2)
vehicle. It is part of an excellent display of space history artifacts at
the museum at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, visited during the
Blue tour. Fuel and oxidiser pumps are at the bottom; the spherical
combustion chamber and exhaust nozzle are at the top. 
The blockhouse at launch complex 26; the starting point of America's
adventures into space. The interior contains many examples of the original
equipment used in the late '50s amd early 60's for America's first
launches. 
This is a replica of the original launch gantry at Launch Complex 26
from which America's first satellite, Explorer I, was launched. (January
31, 1958) 
This is the Mission Control Center, used for the Mercury flights and
the first manned Gemini mission, now kept in its original condition at
Cape Canaveral Air Force Station 
The sun has returned - and I'm just about to head across the Atlantic
for home! 
The Space Shuttle's Landing Facility, 15,000 x 300 feet, seen from the
####### of a Cessna 150