Monday, March 2nd:
First stop today was the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. A rainy, 120-mile (200 Km) drive from Nashville. This is our first time in Alabama – lengthening our list of states we have visited.
We are on our way to Birmingham, about another 100-miles from Huntsville, so we passed on the many other exhibits and rides, opting for just the bus tour.
The bus tour is 2 1/2 hours so you do get a fair amount of space nerd experience in that time! We have 2 days at the Kennedy Space Center coming up later in the trip so no worries that we are shorting the space program exploration.
It’s a big sprawling campus with a very 70s architecture. There’s definitely not a lot of money being spent on frills there. We spent quite a bit of time at the operations center watching the staff in action and hearing about the different roles. These guys are basically monitoring and directly interacting with the hardware and people on the International Space Station. Great displays showing live feeds from the ISS as well
Another very cool stop was the Redstone Test Stand, a National Historic Landmark. It was built in 1953 by Werner von Braun and team for $25,000 from scrap materials including things like chemical containers used for shipping that were cut and repurposed to build the control center. They didn’t have funding and they needed the test stand to make progress so they cobbled it together for an amount of money they could get without any Congressional approval. They used it for static testing of missiles in the 50s and 60s.
We drove past and stopped at a number of rocket and missile displays. (Fun fact from the tour: Missiles fire weapons and rockets launch people and materials.) They have one of the original mock-ups of the Space Shuttle attached to its launch rockets, a full Saturn 5 missile and lots of early rockets used in the space program.
The last stop on the tour was the area where they are working on the systems that support astronauts on the Space Station and on upcoming long-distance (lunar orbit and Mars) missions. The major focus is shrinking the footprint needed for water and air filtration and recycling systems. Another fun fact, they periodically collect urine in the restrooms to use in their testing.
We arrived at our Birmingham Airbnb around 5. We need to do some re-planning as sadly the Gees Bend trip has been rescheduled for September. We decided to take a walk and get a pizza from a place about 1/2 mile away according to Google. It may have been 1/2 a mile in a straight line, but given the abysmal condition of the roads and sidewalks, it seemed much longer. It was bad enough that we got a Lyft to drive us back! Pizza was really good though and we pulled out a nice bottle of Virginia wine to stoke the planning juices.
New plan has us going to Hattiesburg where there is a nice bike trail and then driving along the Gulf Coast to Mobile and eventually back on to the original plan starting in Fairhope, Alabama on Sunday. So no quilting, but more biking.
We just heard about the tornado in Nashville. Touched down very close to where we were staying. Reminds me of our earthquake dodge in NZ. We do have a lucky star hanging over us I guess!