“We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard!” ~ President John F. Kennedy, September 12, 1962
By the 1980’s, American space travel seemed to be “old hat”, “routine” or even “easy”. It was anything but. We were accustomed to seeing space shuttle launches every few months on television. That was a good thing because it showed that only America could pull off such a hard endeavor and do the very difficult things we were doing.
Tulsa’s Air and Space museum has some good testimonies to flight and space flight. Their F-14 Tomcat, space shuttle landing simulator and new Apollo-themed area are crowd favorites, as is the planetarium.
If you would like to see a major space educational space center, visit The Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, Kansas. The place is amazing! They have half of a mock-up space shuttle built into the wall. There is also an actual SR-71 Blackbird spy plane in the lobby. This retired jet could fly over Kansas from east to west in 11 minutes! (Yes, you read that correctly.)
On top of these attractions, there is an extensive collection of NASA hardware, actual craft flown in outer space, a planetarium, Dr. Goddard’s Laboratory and much more. A person could easily spend the whole weekend there and not get bored. For pictures of the Cosmosphere, check out my photo album on it on this website.
Did you know that Oklahoma has its own space port? The Burns Flat facility in the western part of the state is only one of six such installations nationwide. It has the largest flight corridor that does is not hemmed in by commercial or military flight corridors. That means if someone wants to establish a civilian space flight tour, their corridor has more room to fly around than any other in the country.
Private companies Space X, Virgin Galactic and others have developed exciting new rockets to take man back into space. More of these will be ready very soon! NASA is training astronauts to head to the Moon, asteroids and Mars. It is an exciting time for space travel. When left unbridled, Americans have the potential to accomplish even the hardest tasks!
Congratulations to Space X for returning American astronauts to space from American soil! This has been a long time coming and should last for centuries!
If you want to learn more about man’s complicated but brilliant trips to the Moon, you can read the book Astronautics or watch the dvd series “When We Left Earth” and “In The Shadow Of The Moon”.