A Tour of Kennedy Space Center - July 1981

A pamphlet I received in 1975 with information about Kennedy Space Center. (NASA/KSC)

Life is filled with firsts and one of the more memorable ones from my youth was my first visit to the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) on July 15, 1981 when I was 19 years old. As my long-time readers are aware, my interest in space was first kindled around 1966 by watching a Gemini launch when I was about four years old (see “When I thought My Dad Was an Astronaut”) and ultimately flourished with the Apollo 11 Moon landing and subsequent events through the 1970s (see “Growing Up in the Space Age: Summer Vacations in the 70s”). Visiting KSC was a dream of mine as a kid especially after receiving information about the visitor center in some mailings from NASA. But, I never had the opportunity growing up in the old mill city of Lowell, Massachusetts with my family vacations largely confined to New England.

All that changed in the spring of 1981 when my girlfriend at the time and her parents (who were teachers with their summers off) invited me to visit them during their annual month-long summer vacation in the Daytona Beach area. Not only would this be my first trip to Florida, it was also the first time I would travel by air. Knowing of my interest in space, a trip to visit KSC was at the top of the agenda for my first full day in Florida. While my girlfriend’s parents spent the day visiting with family in Cocoa Beach, she and I drove up to nearby KSC for the day. Armed with my new Pentax K-1000 35 mm camera, I recorded many of the sights during this memorable trip which (thanks to my careful archiving of my photographic negatives over the last 45 years) I can share today with my Gentle Readers.

A map of the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Center from about the time of my visit in July 1981. Click on image to enlarge. (NASA/KSC)

The Bus Tour of Launch Complex 39

Heeding the hard-won advice of my hosts, the first thing we did upon our arrival was buy tickets for one of the two popular KSC bus tours run by TWA Services. One of the tours visited the old launch facilities on Cape Canaveral but we booked the tour of Launch Complex 39 which had supported the Apollo as well as Skylab missions I grew up with and was currently being used for the then-new Space Shuttle program.

A photomosaic of the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) still sporting its American bicentennial logo. (All images are by A.J. LePage unless otherwise noted)

One of the first things that became apparent to me during this tour was the truly huge scale of everything involved with the Apollo program. Even though we did not get all that close anything, the field of view of my camera with its standard 50 mm lens was too small to capture the scenes in a single image requiring me to make photomosaics to record it all. Our first stop of the tour was at the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at Launch Complex 39 (LC-39) where the Apollo Moon rockets had been assembled and was now being used to stack the Space Shuttle for launch. At this time, the VAB was still sporting the American bicentennial logo from five years earlier. I was told that unlike previous years, the tour no longer included a visit inside the VAB because of the presence of the Space Shuttles Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs) which created a new safety hazard for tourists.

A photomosaic of a Saturn V Moon rocket on outdoor display near the VAB.

A photomosaic of one of the Crawler-Transporters parked outside the VAB. It had been used to transport the Saturn V (and by 1981, was being used to transport the Space Shuttle) from the VAB to the launch pads.

Also visible at this first stop of the tour was a distant view of the Saturn V on display outside of the VAB. This rocket consisted of the S-IC-T first stage used for static testing as well as the S-II-14 and S-IVB-514 stages from the original, flightworthy SA-514 Moon rocket. It would be another 15 years before this rocket was refurbished and moved into a dedicated building for indoor display where it resides today. Parked nearby was one of the pair Crawler-Transporters used to move the Apollo Moon rocket and now the Space Shuttle from the VAB to one of the pair of launch pads at LC-39.

A view of the new Orbiter Processing Facility (OPF-1 and OPF-2) where the Space Shuttle was prepared for flight and refurbished following its return.

Across the way from the Saturn V on display was the new Orbiter Processing Facility (OPF-1 and OPF-2) used to prepare the Shuttle for stacking and refurbish it upon its return to Earth. At this time, the Space Shuttle Columbia was inside the building being processed following its successful inaugural flight three months earlier in April 1981. The next stop of the tour was near Pad A (LC-39A) which would next be used to support the STS-2 launch in four months.

A view of Pad A at Launch Complex 39. While empty here, it would support the STS-2 Space Shuttle mission to be launched in four month in November 1981.

A photomosaic of Mobile Launcher-1 (ML-1) with the “milk stool”, used to support Apollo-Saturn IB launches from LC-39, still in place.

During the return leg from LC-39A, we stopped to get a good look at the Apollo-era Mobile Launcher-1 (ML-1) with its iconic “milk stool” still in place (see “SA-206: The Odyssey of a Saturn IB”). ML-1 had been modified to support launches of the Apollo-Saturn IB for the Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) after the deactivation of LC-34 and LC-37 in January 1969 (see “From Apollo to Orion: Space Launch Complex 37”). The tower and milk stool would be dismantled later and the platform modified to support Space Shuttle launches starting in 1990 with the designation Mobile Launch Platform-3 (MLP-3)

A view down the new Runway 15/33 of the Shuttle Landing Facility at Kennedy Space Center.

The final brief stop of the tour allowed us a view from the bus of Runway 15/33 of the new Shuttle Landing Facility. Built to support Shuttle landings, it would be another 2½ years before it would host its first Space Shuttle mission, STS-41B, which landed here in February 1984.

The Rocket Garden

Following our return from the bus tour and a well-deserved lunch break, we then wandered through the Rocket Garden at the KSC Visitor Center. Many of the historical rockets I had read about over the last decade were on display allowing me my first opportunity to look at real rockets and related hardware closeup.

A view of the Mercury-Atlas and Mercury-Redstone in the KSC Rocket Garden.

A photomosaic of the Gemin-Titan II on display.

A view of a Atlas-Agena, an early Delta and the Juno I in the Rocket Garden.

An obligatory tourist picture of me (at age 19) sitting on the display of an H-1 engine outside the KSC Visitor Center.

My girlfriend standing in front of an F-1 engine on display.

Probably my favorite of these was the Apollo-Saturn IB on display at the edge of the Rocket Garden. It consists of the Saturn IB SA-209, which was to be used for a Skylab rescue mission if needed, and a boilerplate M-11 Apollo spacecraft, which had been used for various facility checks over the years including on the Saturn 500F used to checkout procedures at the VAB and checks at LC-39A during the summer of 1966 (see “The Saturn 500F: The Moon Rocket That Couldn’t Fly”).

A photomosaic of the Saturn IB on display at the edge of the Rocket Garden.

A closeup of the tail end of the Saturn IB with its eight H-1 engines.

The Apollo Lunar Module (LM) display.

The display of the Apollo White Room and its umbilical arm.

The Hall of History

The final stop of the day was to the exhibits inside the Visitor Center’s Hall of History – a welcomed air conditioned respite from the sweltering 90°-plus F (32°-plus C) heat of the Florida summer. The one thing that stuck out for me was all the exhibits crammed into the halls and how crowded it was with tourists like myself. The close confines made it especially difficult to photograph much but, I managed. I got to see my first Gemini spacecraft during this visit – the Gemini 9 reentry module flown 15 years earlier in June 1966 (see “The Angry Alligator & The Snake: The Mission of Gemini 9”).

The reentry module of NASA’s Gemini 9 mission on display.

Also there was the Command Module (CM) from the ASTP mission from July 1975. While I had been inside of the CM mockup on display at the Boston Museum a Science for the first time a decade earlier (see “Plans for a Command Module of My Own”), this was the first real CM I had ever seen. Now that the statute of limitations has long passed, I admit that I could not resist reaching over the plexiglass enclosure to touch the charred CM heat shield and even saved the gritty residue on my fingers on a piece of paper I had in my camera bag as a memento (that heat shield was manufactured by Avco in my hometown of Lowell!). Hanging from the ceiling nearby was a display model of the Soyuz spacecraft used for ASTP – the first time I had ever seen a Soviet spacecraft in person.

The Apollo Command Module (CM) used for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) on display six years after its flight in July 1975.

A model of the Soyuz, as configured for the ASTP mission, hanging from the ceiling of one of the exhibit halls.

Hanging elsewhere from the ceiling were models of many of the spacecraft I had read about while growing up. There was a Block III Ranger which, from 1965-66, took high-resolution television images of the lunar surface before impacting (see the Ranger Program Page). Also on display was a model of NASA’s Lunar Orbiter which mapped the Moon and scouted out potential lunar landing sites from 1966-67 (see the Lunar Program Orbiter Page). To round out the lunar-oriented exhibit was a display of an actual lunar sample from the Apollo 17 mission from 1972. This was only the second lunar sample I had ever seen after the display at the Boston Museum of Science of a few grains of lunar soil from the Apollo 11 mission.

A model of the Block III Ranger used to return high-resolution television images of the Moon before it impacted the lunar surface.

A model of the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft used to map the Moon and potential lunar landing sites in 1966-67.

A display of a lunar sample returned by the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972.

In another part of the exhibit was a model of the Mariner 4 spacecraft which had taken the first closeup images of Mars 16 years earlier in July 1965 (see “Mariner 4 to Mars”). Also on display was a model of the Viking lander whose mission to Mars I had followed so closely five summers ago (see the Viking Page). I was struck by how large it was, not to mention how difficult it was to photograph in the tight confines of the exhibit hall.

A model of Mariner 4 on which made the first successful spacecraft encounter with Mars.

A photomosaic of a model of the Viking Mars lander.

Naturally the Visitor Center exhibit included displays of the brand new Space Shuttle which held so much promise for the future of the American space program. And almost as an afterthought, I found a lonely model hanging from the ceiling of the Explorer 1 satellite which launched the US into the space race in January 1958 (see “Explorer 1: America’s First Satellite”).

A scale model of NASA’s Space Shuttle with its External Tank and pair of Solid Rocket Boosters.

A model of the Space Shuttle hanging from the ceiling with a Spacelab module in its cargo bay.

A model of the Explorer 1 satellite which opened the Space Age for the United States with its launch in January 1958.

Afterwards

A parting shot of the Rocket Garden as we left the KSC Visitor Center.

After a great day at KSC, and with the afternoon thunderstorms building in the area, I took a parting shot of the Rocket Garden before leaving to meet up with the rest of our party for dinner.

The cover of Kenneth Gatland’s The Illustrated Encylopedia of Space Technology which I bought during my trip to Florida in July 1981.

While I did the usual tourist activities for my remaining week in Florida (like enjoying the beach, visiting Disney World and the like), I did have one more memorable space-related event during that trip to Florida. During an afternoon visit to one of the local malls, I stumbled upon a copy of the just-released The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Space Technology by Kenneth Gatland in a bookstore (you know, those places one bought books before the advent of Amazon). I had already enjoyed reading a couple of Gatland’s earlier books from The Pocket Encyclopedia of Spaceflight in Color series, specifically Manned Spacecraft and Robot Explorers, during the mid-1970s from my junior high school’s library, but this new volume exceeded those by almost any measure. With its many color diagrams of American and Soviet space hardware, complete listings of lunar and planetary missions (including many secret Soviet failures) and tables of launch vehicle information (not to mention the spectacular foldout illustrating many of those rockets), this was instantly my favorite book on space exploration. I have that same copy in my library today (well worn with its colorful dust jacket now long gone) and still refer to it frequently.

While it would be almost three years before I would visit Florida and KSC again (this time for college spring break with my friends), I still recall my first visit fondly even after all these decades.

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