Girls on Tour Again!: Of stars and space, and time

When I was a little girl, my grandmother had a children's encyclopaedia. It was bound in red fabric, and under under the section of 'The World" there was a double page spread about space travel. It showed an artist's impression of the view of the earth from the moon.

I was completely entranced by this and have been fascinated by stars and stories ever since. To visit the Kennedy Space Station is a perfect way to combine the two.

Karen being very un-British....

Being an organised sort, Fiona had booked us on two main activities - the Special Interest Tour and lunch with an astronaut. The tours seem to be run by people who either do, or did, work at the Space Centre. This gives their narrative a passion and an authenticity which is hard to beat.

However, it also gives the audience - ready or not - a massive amount of data. Our tour guide, Bill, spouted more acronyms in five minutes than I heard in five months of project management meetings, and we both wondered whether two thirds of the information might be cut from his 90-minute tour to improve his communication with an increasingly bewildered, multi-national audience.

We did see some very cool kit, nevertheless. At one stage we wondered whether we'd been parachuted into an episode of Thunderbirds, with launch pads, crawler transporters and vehicle assembly buildings.

Here's one of the crawler transporters, and for those not familiar with Gerry Anderson, let us reassure you that this looks just like one of the pods from Thunderbird 2.

Crawler transporters - perfect for that Monday morning commute on the M25

We watched the countdown to the launch of one of the Apollo missions where the control room was just as it had been during the launch. Even though we knew the ending, there was an enormous amount of tension in the auditorium as the countdown continued.

"Houston, we've lost Tom Hanks. I repeat, we've lost Tom Hanks."

The Space Centre also made us feel - well, a bit humbled. I mean, just look at the size of these engines.

Now that's a hairdryer....

And it must be really special to work for an enterprise which - on the face of it, certainly - is so....noble.

I don't want to get all philosophical - after all, this is a holiday blog - but with something so huge, which requires so much courage to undertake, which has such potential consequences for the rest of the world (or humankind, as the KSC likes to call it) - well, I spent most of the day with a lump in my throat, thinking of that encyclopaedia illustration and wondering what I might have done if I'd been any use at all at maths.

The Space Centre talks a great deal about inspiring people to do the impossible. One of the sights which did bring me back to my comfortable, cynical self was the inscription about the International Space Centre which was something like, 'a triumph of engineering and international co-operation'.

I found myself thinking - well, if this is true, why only on this? Why not also about feeding the world, reducing climate change, preventing war, reducing poverty? I know that life isn't a Coca-Cola commercial, but if we're so bright we can put a man on the moon, land on an asteroid, go to Mars - why are the people-focused endeavours left untouched?

It doesn't help, I suppose, that the commercial space partners for NASA also produce some of the nastiest weapons in the world and it's not in their interests to have world peace. The US, despite coming in peace (apparently), abstained from the 2014 UN Resolution on preventing an arms race in outer space.

But before this gets all party-political (perhaps another of the reasons?), here are some more pictures from our day, including one of Snoopy the Astronaut. Obviously.