cyrano: (Coyote Rocket)
Cyrano Jones ([personal profile] cyrano) wrote2011-02-07 07:51 pm

Themey! Parky!

Today was the trip out to Cape Canaveral to see the Kennedy Space Center. Yay! We saw displays and replics and replicas and videos... we watched people ride the shuttle simulator.
I spent a lot of time wandering around the Apollo/Saturn V center. Apollo is the one that is 'important' for me. Anything about Apollo I makes me sniffly. Apollo 11 landed two weeks after I was born. Apollo 13 just makes me go "Awww. Poor Lovell."
I was standing in the rocket garden, in front of the huge Jupiter, thinking "I should take a picture of this! This is the first piece of hardware we threw on the moon! Historic!"
And then I frowned. I couldn't see anything about this shot, aesthetically, that was all that interesting, and there are already plenty of pictures of this class of rocket out there. So... there were a bunch of pictures like that which I didn't take, and there are three pictures of starlings out on the snackery patio.

[identity profile] mszappata.livejournal.com 2011-02-08 02:39 am (UTC)(link)
Why does space exploration fascinate so many people?

[identity profile] cyranocyrano.livejournal.com 2011-02-08 04:14 am (UTC)(link)
Possibly the same 'why' that drove Europeans to Kilamanjaro or Tibet in the 19th Century, or pushed Americans west, or the people building online communities, or that will move us to explore under the oceans--the idea of seeing things nobody has seen, of being places others can't or won't, being on the edge of humanity rather than feeling buried in the middle of it.

A new frontier is exciting, a peek across the veil to find a world unknown.

[identity profile] miss-friday.livejournal.com 2011-02-08 06:14 am (UTC)(link)
To quote the godlike Aaron Sorkin and his character, Sam Seaborn, "Because it's next. For we came out of the cave, and we looked over the hill, and we saw fire. And we crossed the ocean, and we pioneered the West, and we took to the sky. The history of man is hung on the timeline of exploration, and this [space] is what's next."