A Visit to Alabama Part Five

The next day we finally made our way to the famous Huntsville Space and Rocket Center. It is known worldwide and has been for years. I remember visiting there when I was a kid and I was ga-ga for the place because it is the home of the NASA Space Camp and I was blessed to grow up in a time when the movie "Space Camp" had just come out and was super popular especially in my home.
This time, I was excited to see how the exhibits had changed and to share the cool things I remembered with Kevin and Trace. They had a really cool wall with all the names of previous astronauts engraved on it. It was breathtaking. Some of the return vessels that the astronauts used in years past seemed very flimsy! It was really cool to see all the things that go into space travel.

This looks exactly like the "Stargate" to me......maybe a portal to reach other worlds?

This is a model like the moon buggy. The wood set next to the model is an example of how they folded it up to transport it to the moon. Pretty ingenious!

An actual MOON ROCK!

"Father and Son spacesuits" Kevin and Trace HAD to get a photo of this one!

Looks like it's made out of plywood right?

The simulation wind tunnel

Trace walked slowly on the "moon surface" to replicate low gravity.

Inside the museum onsite, they had a rock wall that Trace wanted to climb

When he got almost to the top he turned and said; "I forgot, I'm afraid of heights, I want to get down now!" I tried to encourage him to keep going, but he was having none of it.

Simulation game

There was a hands-on exhibit that you could build your own structure. Trace jumped right in!

This is his completed project

Lots of exhibits on the effects of the laws of physics!

All in all, even though we were exhausted, it was a really fun day! My favorite thing, I didn't even take a picture of. The door of the museum had a plaque that was identified as the "sun". Then in scale distances, they have respective plaques with all the planets on them as you continue out of the museum. The size of the planets on each plaque was the size of the planet in relation to the sun representation at the museum door. So Jupiter was a round statue about the size of a basketball and Pluto was the size of a marble and located way out at the very end of the property at the street exit from the parking lot. Really a cool way to display the layout of our galaxy!