Those early capsules were small – it was said that you didn’t get into Mercury, you put it on. Endeavour on display at the centerĪnd then there is Endeavour. This module had been built to fly to the Moon in a planned Apollo 18 mission that was cancelled after funding for the programme was cut. There’s the two-man Gemini 11 capsule used by astronauts Dick Gordon and Pete Conrad in 1966.Īnd there’s the three-man Apollo command module that linked up with an orbiting Russian Soyuz spacecraft in 1975 in the first international human space flight mission. There’s the Mercury capsule that carried a chimpanzee called Ham into space in preparation for Shepard’s flight. But I guess it was a reflection of the fascination space travel holds for so many. I was surprised by this remark, as if he had been he would no longer be young with most of his life ahead of him. A colleague in his twenties who liked the movie said he wished he’d been alive during that pioneering era of space travel to witness it all first-hand. The Dish, a film about a communications team in Australia that helped to relay TV pictures of the Apollo 11 moon landing, was released in 2000. While at the complex, I gawped in wonder at the sheer size of a Saturn V that lay in sections along the side of a road. The same roadway had carried the giant Apollo 11 Saturn V Moon rocket to the pad. I travelled on a bus along the road on which the shuttle had been transported to Launchpad 39A where the takeoff had happened. I also visited the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington to see the space exhibits and touch the little piece of moon rock on display.Ī few days after witnessing the launch from afar I went to the space centre. That shuttle launch happened in November 1981, and I saw it as I was nearing the end of an East Coast tour from New York to Florida. I listened as John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, gave a speech there.Īnd I never missed an episode of a BBC TV science show called Tomorrow’s World which covered the run-up to the first Moon landing in lavish detail. I visited the museum in Edinburgh often to peer at the spacecraft, which was clad in protective clear plastic. If this was intended to create an interest in space among young people, then it certainly worked with me. When I was at school Freedom 7, the Mercury capsule Alan Shepard flew in when he became America’s first astronaut in 1961, was displayed at a museum in my hometown. For someone who had been entranced by space travel since childhood, this was quite a moment. The shuttle Columbia was a small white speck rising steadily on a column of smoke. Gazing up, I saw what they were looking at – the second space shuttle mission was blasting off from the John F.
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