Houston, We have some Russians

The visitor center at the entrance to Texas was really cool.  There was a walkway over a marshland and we got to see turtles, birds, snakes, toads and crabs hunting for fish.  Very cool.

We arrived at NASA Mission Control in Houston, Texas after an early morning drive from our campsite. This is the only thing we only wanted to do in Houston.

At first the museum was more like children’s arcade or something, with little kids running around and interactive exhibits geared toward them were everywhere. Even the map was childish. Nevertheless, we quickly found the cockpit of the space shuttle and got to look around inside. Very cool – you can see what the pilots see when they land and all of the instrumentation.

Then we go in line to go for a tour of the actual mission control room NASA uses for current space missions.  The wait was long and tedious but we were finally seated in the tram that took us on a tour of the NASA buildings.  On the outside they were nothing impressive at all, but we passed a building were they do all the design work for the future rockets, the historical control room used from 1960s until 1995 and the astronaut training facility.  We arrived at the control room and we were seated in a little auditorium right above it.  There was a very informative lecture about it, mentioning that NASA is switching back to a capsule design, has goals to get back to the moon, and eventually to Mars.

Our next stop on the tour was rocket park.  There were two rockets outside which were cool but the real surprise was in the nondescript building next to it.  The rockets inside were like nothing I’ve ever see.  They were so tremendous it was mind boggling.  We walked around, snapped some photos and set off to San Antonio after a quick refueling mission at McDonalds.

The only actual photo of Houston itself: