Going to the Florida coast? For the first time in more than 30 years, NASA is allowing Kennedy Space Center visitors inside the Launch Control Center - where NASA directors and engineers supervised all of the 152 launches including the space shuttle and Apollo programs.
The KSC Up-Close: Launch Control Center (LCC) Tour, the second in Kennedy Space Center's special 50th anniversary series of rare-access tours, takes visitors inside Firing Room 4, one of the LCC's four firing rooms and the one from which all 21 shuttle launches since 2006 were controlled.
Inside Firing Room 4, visitors will pass by the computer consoles at which engineers monitored the computerized launch control system's thousands of system checks every minute leading up to launch. They'll see the main launch countdown clock and many large video monitors on the walls, and enter the "bubble room," with its wall of interior windows through which the Kennedy Space Center management team viewed all of the proceedings below.
A Rare Opportunity- As with the Vehicle Assembly Building, visitors have not had access to the LCC since the late 1970s, during the period after the Apollo and Skylab programs ended and before the first space shuttle launch in 1981.
The LCC will continue to operate in guiding the next generation of rocket launches from Kennedy Space Center for NASA and potentially for commercial space programs. Future launches of SpaceX, whose recent launch from nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station resulted in the first mission by a commercial company to travel to and dock with the International Space Station, could take place from Kennedy Space Center beginning in 2013.
The LCC Tour is led by a trained space expert, giving visitors an insider's view of the space program from launch preparation to liftoff. The tour also includes drive-by views of Launch Pad 39 and culminates at the Apollo/Saturn V Center, where visitors can resume the regular tour.
The tour will also showcase the LCC's lobby, which features 152 wall plaques - one for every mission guided there since the first, the unmanned Apollo 4 in 1967. Included are the manned Apollo moon missions, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975, the Saturn V launches for Skylab in the mid-1970s, and the launches for the 30-year Space Shuttle Program.
The LCC is also listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places and won an architectural award for industrial design from the American Institute of Architecture in 1965. The lead architect, Martin Stein, said the building's prominent windows overlooking the launch pads of Launch Complex 39, where all of the shuttles and Saturn V rockets were launched, made a statement as windows "through which you could see mankind's future."
For reservation and ticket info:
http://kennedyspacecenter.com/launch-control-center-tour.aspx