Family Day

Today was the not-so-annual Family Day for Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Sophia doesn't care much about this stuff at her age and Melissa had a big teacher certification test thing today, so I took Emma and Paige. I tried to take the Schrader boys too, but Ethan had soccer today and Noah didn't want to go, so Will totally made out. All the kids came home with 2 bags full of freebies. They got frisbees, stickers, posters, pens, pencils, spaceship models, mission patches, keychains, badge lanyards, commemorative coins, and even an autograph from an astronaut.

Here are the kids posing by the countdown clock. To the far left (Endeavour) and far right (Atlantis) you can see the shuttles on the pads. This is probably the last family day that will take place before the shuttles are retired. And this is one of only about a dozen times there have been shuttles on both pads.


We waited almost 2 hours to drive by the shuttles on the pads. It's a loop that's just a few miles long, but it moves SLOWLY on family day. But I did get some really good pictures out of it.


Here are the kids with Alan Poindexter. Yes, THE Alan Poindexter. And Flat Stanley that Will brought along for some photo ops.


The kids standing in John Glenn's parking spot at Complex 14.

The AF museum at Complex 36. Inside they have all of the old equipment that was used in this blockhouse to launch our first satellite. It looks ancient, and sadly a lot of that old technology lingers on the ranges today. There isn't always money to buy new stuff, so refurbing the old wire wrap boards ends up happening more than it should! But we're at least making a huge effort to get rid of the wire wrap at this point...