Houston, we have a playground

Space Center Houston is an edutainment complex that ajoins the Johnson Space Center in Houston, an enormous NASA campus where we learned that 14K rocket scientists and other NASA types are hard at work analyzing the suitability of moon soil for agriculture and planning a trip to Mars. Armed with a strong recommendation from Priscilla Hobbs, PhD (my advice: pay attention to any recommendations you get from anyone who wrote their dissertation about disneyland, at least when its about museums and such), we decided to take advantage of the time difference to hit the space center on a week day. I'd  roll into the office a little later than usual, but lunch time in Houston is 10am in San Jose.

Driving in on the nasa parkway, I tried to explain to the kids that we would be visiting the mission control for the Apollo missions, where 50 years ago humans were for the first time in history escaping the bounds of the earth and starting to explore the solar system. Add explaining Apollo missions to kids to the list where there's room for improvement.

Everyone assured us that we needed to go straight to the Tram when we walked into the center, as tours might get cancelled if the rain set in. So we jumped on a Tram right away, and were soon riding through a NASA campus to a windowless building where we would get to explore the mission control room where all the Apollo missions had been controlled (There's got to be a better verb for this).

The control room we visited is now a shrine to the Apollo and Space Shuttle missions that were launched there. I was totally floored.

Hannah was bored out of her mind. She did take one picture of the room:

But honestly, she wasn't impressed, and proceeded to take a series of pictures of her leg and the chair in front of her. For example:

And she was incredibly well behaved while she did this too.

Next, we got to walk down a gallery above a giant warehouse filled with mockups of all the different places an Astronaut could end up: A full replica of the space station, a soyuz capsule, the front section of the space shuttle, the robot arm on the space station, and a bunch of prototypes of stuff that isn't in space yet. Here's a rover that may go to space someday:

I think Izzy took this picture? The last stop on the tour was a Saturn V rocket, which is much bigger than you could possibly imagine:

The full rocket is laid out in a giant warehouse, each section separated so that you can see how the stages worked. This is the tail section, bigger than all our houses put together, which would use its fuel in about 2 minutes to get the rocket up the first part of its ascent from Earth's gravity well. The rocket that powered it for the 250K trip to the moon was tiny compared to the five monsters shown here.

The best part of the tram ride? The family on the bench behind us. You can see Eli breaking the ice in the tram:

New to Houston from Baton Rouge, and with kids in the right age range (10 & 7), Eli & Izzy were quickly having trouble noticing trivial things like 300' rockets to talk about Spiderman and other superheroes with their new friends. All the kids agreed that it was high time to get back to the Center where a giant playground was waiting. After the usual arguments on the merits of eating when a really good playground is waiting, the children disappeared into  a three story maze featuring giant slides, guns that fired three inch foam balls, and a more educational video games than you could shake a stick at. For a few minutes, I even had a grown up conversation in the bleachers provided for the parents to rest while the kids played.

Hannah was kind enough to periodically run past me so that I could reassure myself of her well being. I gave her the camera for a while to document what is by far the coolest playground I've ever seen. Here's one of her photos:

I guess you had to be there? ( web site: http://www.spacecenter.org/KidsSpacePlace.html)

When we got back to the hotel so that I could start my work day, Eli and Izzy were begging to go back, so I think the visit was successful. And today, Eli told the owner of an ice cream shop that he'd like to be an Astronaut. Which he would be awesome at.

Neil Armstrong passed away today. Two days ago we were watching video of him walking on the moon, and sitting in the control room he was talking to when he said "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."