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**btp** · 08-10-2012, 10:27 AM

Edit: Okay apologies if these pictures are coming out huge, generally I'll just tell photobucket to resize them and all problems are solved, but at the moment the resize doesn't seem to want to take. Of course that could just be my browser cache but I cleared that so I dunno. The cause is probably "using photobucket". but iiiim not sure which folders I stuffed the originals into so I'm a just gonna leave them here for when it's not 5 in the morning.

MORE STORIES OF WHERE THIS WATCH BE:

So anyway Noodles and I took this sucker on the NASA tram tour which conveniently stops at Mission Control. (see above picture)

Now "Mission Control" means a lot of things, and it didn't really mean everything that I wanted it to mean. For example, I thought it might mean "The Historic Mission Control Room that Coordinated the Apollo Missions."

well no it didn't.

I also thought it might mean "The current mission control where people are working and celebrating things like Dragon docking with the ISS or Curiosity rover landing on Mars."

No not that either.

What it does mean was: In the same huge ass building as those other two things and one floor directly below the second thing I mentioned, and viewing the previous mission control that was used in between the Apollo missions and present day and had the same screens that are typically shown on the floor above us and live feeds from the ISS so still pretty cool right?"

Anyway here are the pictures:

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So we listened to a college intern give a speech about space and space programs and then took questions. Some guy apparently confused Bruce Willis' Armageddon with reality and asked about when we landed on that meteor. I figured the bar couldn't be set any lower so I asked where the hell NASA was when the Aliens took over on july 4th and Bill Pullman had to save us all. (Her look told me two things: 1) she genuinely thought I was serious, possibly due to past experience, and 2) she has never seen the movie Independence Day. both things made me pity her greatly)

THEN WE WENT TO ROCKET PARK WEEEEEE

Rocket park is an outdoor park with Rockets that I don't know much about but there there was the SATURN V ROCKET. (see above picture again) (Also a new one).

So I spent a great deal of time mashing buttons on my eyephone trying to figure out exactly which saturn V Rocket this one was. (Noodles spent most of her time making this.)

Okay so like Mission Control I was hoping that this thing was cooler than was logistically possible. I was hoping that maybe this gigantic crazy intact rocket had been into space and back again.

Well turns out the Saturn V rockets (okay if you didn't scan the wiki already these are the rockets that ran the moon missions), are disposable rockets. You just sort of leave the parts in space. Most are not meant to return. So this rocket was actually a bit of a mash up from a couple of Saturn V's that didn't go to space (the front bit was initially supposed to go star-bound, but they instead used the rest for a non-manned mission so they didn't need the extra stages to bring the people back).

I explored it a bit. Walked around, and then noticed that there was one part where if I leaned in just right and didn't bother anyone I could actually maybe sort of put the watch...inside the rocket.

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We then took the tram ride back to the not-nasa part of nasa. We checked out the food court, which touted such classes as :"Moon Wok", "South of the Martian Border", and "Italian Bistro", and decided that it was probably better to spend our food budget elsewhere. (despite how tempting "SPACE DIPPN DOTS" looked)