It is a bright and sunny day in Florida as Colin parks our rental car in Zone 5 and we make our way to the ticket window - welcome to the Kennedy Space Center. Welcome to the history - and the future - of a dream.
For me, this trip is very much a pilgrimage. I'm a child of the space age, born six months after Yuri Gargarin's first trip into orbit in May of 1961. My entire childhood was spent immersed in the space race, and I have clear memories of the fuzzy black-and-white footage of Neil Armstrong taking that first step onto the surface of the Moon in 1969.
The Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex offers a comprehensive overview of the space program, complete with the actual equipment used for the missions. These are not mockups or duplicates, these are the spacesuits that were worn, the capsules that returned, and the control rooms that guided their paths. As such, it's an evocative experience to see - and in some cases touch - the tools used to explore space.
From there, we go into the Early Space Exploration exhibit, which details the early days of the space program. The control room for the Mercury flights seems small and primitive - I'm reminded of that oft-quoted statistic that I have more processing power on my iPhone than in the computers used for the Apollo missions.
In The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe characterizes the first American astronauts from these missions as modern equivalents of single combat warriors, facing their Soviet equivalents as part of the battle for global dominance during the 1960s.
It's easy to see these men in that role, helmed and gauntleted in their clumsy armour of synthetic cloth and metal, faces invisible and anonymous behind golden faceplates.
The weather looks doubtful when we leave the building, so we decide to do the bus tour of the launch sites before it rains.
The tour bus doesn't stop anywhere near the actual launch pads - in fact, the only stop in the circuit is time limited for security reasons. We drive past the Vehicle Assembly Building, built in 1967 to assemble Saturn V launch vehicles, and the tallest single story building in the world. We circle around Launch Complex 40, where Space X launches civilian supply missions to the ISS, and take a quick look at Launch Complex 39.
Unexpectedly,the bus doesn't take us back to the Visitor Center. Instead, we leave the bus at the Apollo Saturn V Center, where we're seated us in the bleachers for the Apollo Control Room and watch a surprisingly evocative countdown to the launch of a Saturn V.
After the video presentation, we proceed to the main event: a 363 foot Saturn V launch vehicle on its side, broken into its separate stages. I'm awestruck - for me, this is the high point of the entire trip. Words fail to express my wonder and amazement.
The bus takes us back to the Visitor Center, where we run through pouring rain to the Space Shuttle Atlantis building.
The Atlantis exhibit starts with a video presentation detailing the challenges faced by the designers of the space shuttle, culminating in the launch of the Columbia in 1981. As the echoes of the launch fade, the screen slides up to reveal Atlantis, the workhorse of the space program's five-shuttle fleet with an epic record of 33 missions, 4,848 earth orbits, and 125,935,769 miles travelled before its retirement.
The three-story exhibit is built around the suspended shuttle, allowing visitors to see the entire vehicle from top to bottom. As I wait for the presentation audience to disperse through the exhibit so I can take an unobstructed picture of Atlantis, I see someone stretch their arm over the railing and brush the edge of the shuttle's open hatch.
A small child sits at a nearby mockup of the space shuttle controls, screaming, "We're going to crash, we're going to crash!" He's too small to realize that it's inappropriate to play that particular game of pretend in this environment: the loss of lives in the Challenger and Columbia accidents still presents a tragic resonance to the space program.
After Atlantis, both Colin and I are ready for a break. We have a late lunch, and decide to give ourselves some down time by watching the Hubble IMAX movie.
Unfortunately, it's not showing that day due to technical issues, so we call it a day - we haven't seen everything the Center has to offer*, but we're just burned out. As we drive back to our Cocoa Beach hotel, I look back at the day and my only regret is that we didn't have another day to spend there. I wish there was some way to send a message back in time to my 12-year old self to tell him about what I've just seen.
Space flight finds its origins in politics, as much a part of the Cold War as the Berlin Wall or the Cuban Missile Crisis. However, unlike those artifacts of the post-war conflict with the USSR, the exploration of space has continued, and developed over time into a purer phenomenon. Space travel is now a global pursuit: the United States works co-operatively with the Russian space agency, and the astronauts visiting the International Space Station come from around the world.
Which is as it should be. When we leave Earth, it shouldn't be as Americans or Canadians or Russians, we should enter space as representatives of humanity.
* The Visitor Center sells two-day tickets - if you decide to visit the KSC, I strongly recommend scheduling the extra day.
