12/16/19
I wasn’t able to sleep at all last night. It was hot, super humid, and I wanted to get up early to go to the space center. That probably messed me up. I decided instead of going to the space center first I was going to try to get some sleep, have lunch, then go. I didn’t get to sleep unfortunately so I was wiped out.
I wanted to go to a Brazilian steakhouse that was in Midtown, Tourão Brazilian Churrasqueria. It was a half hour drive and I went back and forth deciding to go or not. I decided to go and once I got moving I got some energy. I’m glad I went too. The food was really good, not as good as Fogo de Chao though, and the price was cheap, $18. I stuffed myself there and the weather started getting stormy and cool. I went back to the van to change and go to the space center.
Once I got to the Houston Space Center I found out that it and the Johnson Space Center were both part of the admission. I felt better about messing up yesterday. The space center was really cool. I immediately took the tram tour when I got in. The tram took us all around Johnson Space Center. It stopped at the Mission Control building and we got a walking tour and presentation of the building. We got to see the mission control room for the upcoming Orion missions.
Original control console 
80’s control console 
Modern console 
Mission Control Room
Next we went to the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility, SVMF. On our way there we saw a herd of space deer. There is a herd of over 200 deer on the campus and they wander all over. The SVMF was a huge building where they have a complete mockup of the ISS, Orion module, the new rovers, and the robots. This building is used for training astronauts before the go to the ISS.
ISS Modules 
Orion Capsule 
Random robots 
Rovers
We went by a bunch of the other buildings, but didn’t stop at any. The final stop on the tour was at Rocket Park. Here they had the Redstone, Little Joe II, and the Saturn V rockets. This was the most epic part of the tour. We got to go up close to the rockets. The Saturn V was in it’s own building. It was broken apart at the different stages so you could see all of the different parts. This was as amazing as the last one that I saw at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Little Joe II 
Redstone 
After going back to the Houston Space Center building I walked through a mockup of the Space Shuttle and 747 carrier plane.
Shuttle interior 
Shuttle Cockpit 
After checking that out I went back inside to look at the exhibits in there. They had a lot of hands on stuff for kids. I thought the Mars area was interesting. They had the only Martian meteorite that you can touch in the world on display. I touched a thing that was on Mars! They also had a lot of information on the materials of the shuttle, the Orion module, the new SLS rockets, James Webb telescope, ISS, and other random stuff.
Orion module 
Apollo module
