![]() ![]() Jim Lovell, mission commander of one of the most famous near-disasters of the Apollo era - Apollo 13 - made the point to me that a lot of the problems with the Apollo 1 fire had to do with the fact that the capsule was pressurized with pure oxygen. ![]() Grissom, White and Chaffee in the Apollo 1 capsule. Some of the many other highlights of the Canaveral Then and Now Tour are the lighthouse where Wernher Von Braun watched the flights of the monster boosters that he designed, Launch Complex 40 where the hugely successful Cassini-Huygens mission lifted off for Saturn, and Launch Complex 41 where the historic Voyager missions departed for the edges of the solar system - and beyond. When asked what he was thinking as he lay in his cramped capsule waiting for lift-off he answered “The fact that every part of this ship was built by the lowest bidder…” It was a fateful thought, and one that would echo down the years as America’s Apollo Program got under way later in the 1960s. One of the first stops on the tour is Launch Complex 5/6 where Alan Shepherd, the first American in space, was fired into his fifteen minute suborbital flight on May 5 1961. This is a place where the fusion between today’s NASA and its roots in the military rockets of the Cold War are visible for all to see. ![]() Instead of heading straight to the Apollo/Saturn V Visitor’s Center, the bus trundles off the main drag and down small service roads that criss-cross the sprawling Merritt Island launch facility that is home to the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. I, with my family, was privileged to take this tour the last time we were at the Cape. But there is another, lesser known tour that departs from the same bus station - the Canaveral Then and Now Tour. This is all part of the regular NASA tour of the Kennedy Space Center complex, and it is very popular. A few miles away is the NASA Apollo/Saturn V Center, surrounded by tour buses which periodically disgorge a throng of people who stream into a mock-up of Mission Control and then into a giant auditorium where they can gaze in awe at a Saturn V - the vehicle that took men to the Moon. Visible from space, the Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral rears out of the thick, moist air of the Florida swampland like a leviathan from a prehistoric age. ![]()
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