Cool Giant Scissors and a Restored Saturn V Rocket

Photo Credit: collectSPACE.com

Using a pair of giant scissors made possible by technology developed during the Apollo program, the director of the Johnson Space Flight Center announced the opening of a really cool facility to house their Saturn V rocket, one of only two complete ones left after the Apollo program ended.

There is a third, incomplete Saturn V in Huntsville, Alabama.

Thirteen Saturn V rockets were launched between 1967 and 1973. Nine of those boosters took astronauts to the Moon; six of them to a landing on the lunar surface. The last Saturn V to leave Earth lofted the United States’ first space station, Skylab. (Full Article)

This facility is similar to the one at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, but it doesn’t look as elaborate. I was there last summer and was amazed, I spent most of my afternoon there and at the Gus Grissom exhibit where they had his salvaged Mercury Liberty Bell capsule on display.

Next to inventing giant scissors, the Apollo program remains NASA’s crowning achievement (my opinion), I’m glad they’re taking care of the stuff that’s still left so that future generations can look back on what’s been done.

Well, wait a minute, there’s also the Hubble Space Telescope, that was pretty good too. AstroProf named it one of the seven wonders of astronomy, and I gotta agree with that.

John Young, one of only four astronauts to have flown in the Saturn V rocket twice (he was also the commander in the first space flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia), put it succinctly, albeit a little strangely:

It’s very good to show people what we did. You know all these things on the wall that say what everyone did during the Apollo program, I think it’s very important to do that. It’s how you get kids turned on to science and engineering,

Yes. Indeed. Let’s keep doing all that stuff on the wall.

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