"Get Crackin!"

After a few days of overcast weather, last Monday was a great sunny and warm day. We spent most of the day walking on the beach and hanging close to home. Sasha needed to get some exercise, so across the street in front of the park we went, just a few hundred yards to the beach.

Even the DirectTV blimp was out for a leisurely drift across the sky!

The beach was almost deserted after the Spring Break and Easter weekend crowds had left, and the air temp was in the high 70's. Almost made us want to go swimming!

Houston is known for it's oil industry. From financial support, to equipment suppliers and refining complexes, the area is , forgive me, immersed in oil. Feeling the need to get into Houston, we headed north from Galveston on Tuesday on I 45. Just across West Bay, we dropped into Texas City, a busy deepwater port. Known for it's petroleum refining and petrochemical production, it is the third largest city in Galveston County. In 1947 an explosion destroyed the port and nearly destroyed the town, but today all remnants of that tragedy have been erased. We lost count of the number of oil refineries in the area, but there are "a lot". From one point we counted six separate facilities. Oil is brought into the port from the gulf by pipeline or ship and sent to huge tank farms. The fields of tanks looked like Iowa cornfields.

All the petroleum eventually finds its way to the refining facilities where it is broken into various grades of fuel and chemicals. This is known as "Cracking" the oil, since it uses heat to break (crack) the petroleum molecules, which are essentially distilled in large vertical stacks and the result drawn off and piped away.

Back on I 45 after a tour through TC, we headed north through League City, Webster, and Nassau Bay to the Space Center Houston. Once inside, our first mission was to take a shuttle tour around the facility.

The lines were a bit long for the tram, and it was beginning to rain, but we all hung in there for one of the most interesting tours we've seen.













Built on a thousand acres of land donated by Humble Oil Company through Rice University, the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center continues to be a vital part of America's space program. We learned that missions prior to liftoff are controlled by the Launch Control Center (LCC) located at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, but as soon as the tower is cleared, control is handed off to the Mission Control Center in Houston (MCC-H).

Our first stop was the Christopher C. Kraft Mission Control Center, named for the Flight Controller whose voice became a symbol of the space program.

This facility housed the original MCC used during the Moon landings. The building continues to house MCC for the Space Station, along with Mission Control facilities for Russia and China. Under construction directly below the "first" MCC is the MCC for Orion missions to Mars. Awesome!

MCC-H was used from the early 60's with the Gemini program, then through the Apollo missions. Mercury missions were handled by facilities at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Apollo MCC was decommissioned after the moon landing program was scrapped, and the room gutted in preparation for another purpose. Unfortunately, the powers that be forgot that the center had been designated a national historic landmark. Public outcry bought about a reversal of plans and a rebuilding of the control center. All of the original equipment was located, down to chairs, phones, and carpet, and re-installed as it had been.

The comfortable theater seating we used while we listened to a short presentation was original to the facility as well. Strange to imagine astronauts families, government and contractor personnel, all watching tensely as the rockets lifted off, sat in these very same seats!

Our last stop of the (very damp) tour was the Saturn V Building located at Rocket Park. We didn't spend much time outdoors looking at the rockets used for early manned and unmanned flights, but took a peek at the Redstone rocket uses in the Mercury missions. Compare the size of the people to the rocket!

And then try to comprehend the vast size of the Saturn V rocket used in the later missions!

The physical size of the rockets first stage hits you like a rock. It takes your breath away trying to imagine the thrust created by these engines. In 2 1/2 minutes, the booster pushed the rocket 41 miles into the sky and reached a speed of 6,000 mph!

The Saturn V operated from 1967 to 1973, lifting the 45 ton Apollo spacecraft into orbit around the Moon, In 1973, the rocket was used to lift the 120 tone SpaceLab into orbit around the Earth. The entire building is devoted to housing this historic rocket, and it took us so long to walk around it that we missed our tram ride back to the Visitor Center! This is truly a remarkable engineering feat.

And to think that the early Mercury and Apollo missions were performed without the use of a computer! You can bet that the slide rules were clicking at light speed! Later missions, of course, had the benefit of IBM 7094 computers whose mainframes required entire rooms, using exotic cooling fluids, and having the memory of about 1/4 of an iPod…..

Back in the main facility, we toured a Space Shuttle cockpit,

Viewed a replica of Mans First Step on the Moon.

And marveled at the damage space debris can wreak on space craft.

After touring the full size orbiter used in the tv series Star Trek (which is either where this all started, or is where we're going),

we took a last loot at the Boeing Shuttle Transport Plane before heading back to Jamaica Beach.















Wednesday was our last full day in the Galveston area, so a little shopping and such was on the agenda. While in town, we stopped for lunch at the Cajun Greek (!).

Seafood Gumbo, Boudin Balls, and Shrimp Cocktail rounded out our meal, and a great one it was!

I sincerely hope my cardiac support team knows that this was a last-day splurge! Yes, I still feel fine!