At Space Center Houston

Over Spring Break, we went to the Space Center south of Houston. It was really cool! It's normally $20 a person, but we found a deal for half-off tickets if you buy them online, so we got in for $20 total. Woohoo!

Here we are next to an actual landing pod. I can't remember which mission it was from, but it was the real thing.







Touching a real moon rock! I wanted to get the picture with Cora touching it, but she didn't want to keep her hand in there.







This is where the astronauts trained before going up to Skylab, the first American space station. It's called a mock-up. No, that is not a real person; it's just a mannequin.






This is the mock-up for the current space station. We got to take a bus ride to the Johnson Space Center, the actual place where all the scientists work and astronauts train, to see this. We didn't see any astronauts, though. But we did see . . . .





a space suit!









And a mock-up of the space shuttle!
So the tour was pretty awesome.








Then we got to go see a Saturn V rocket, which had all the propulsion to get the astronauts into space. We couldn't tell if it was one that had been used or not, but my guess is it wasn't, because didn't it fall to pieces and crash to the earth? I don't know. It was cool to see, though, and HUGE.





The rocket had a great big long building all to itself. On the wall were descriptions and pictures of all the Apollo missions. So we did learn something, too.










After the tour, we came back to the tourist area and watched a presentation about how astronauts live in space--sleeping, washing, eating, bathing, etc.

Then we got to pose with astronaut helmets!






These helmets were attached to a table by a cord, which obviously wasn't long enough for Josh!