Blast Off!

This morning we toured the Houston Johnson Space Center. The Johnson Center is the heartbeat of the space program because it houses Mission Control. While no rockets are launched nor landed here, all else is controlled here, computer systems, communications, astronaut training and even space food production.

We toured the exhibits, watched an Imax movie about the space station....

...and admired the enormity of the Saturn rockets that have lifted our astronauts for decades.

Then we boarded the Tram Tour to Mission Contol where we sat in the audience area of the earliest missions. Here we learned the combined computer memory there in the 1960's was less than a flip phone today!

Astronauts train in Mockup Vehicles here too. In this area we saw a mockup of the International Space Station and items being tested for future missions to the moon and Mars.

We learned so much and came away wondering why Space Travel is not given the PR now that it had in the 1960s. Americans need to know how important all this stuff is to the progress of scientific pursuits, including such things as healthcare, agriculture and communications!