Land
The longer we are in an area, the better acquainted we become with what it has to offer. A few days ago we discovered Galveston State Park and a short walk through a nature preserve near a housing development called Pirates Cove. Both of these locations are within a few miles of where we're staying. Pirates Cove is named as such because famous pirate, Jean Lafitte, had his base there.
The remains of Jean Laffitte's headquarters has been replaced by an upscale subdivision where many of the large homes have a boat slip on canals off the bay. In the middle of that subdivision was a 36 acre nature preserve with walking trails and a boardwalk through the marsh.
The other land exploration had to do with chasing a little white ball around the golf course which is less than a mile from our "home". I'm choosing not to say anything about how I played.
Sea
One of the tourist type attractions in downtown Galveston is an oil drilling platform. The Ocean Star was once a working oil drilling rig in the ocean. It was a floating rig and when it was no longer in use it was floated into the harbor in Galveston and now serves as an oil rig museum. We learned all about the geology, the geophysics, the economics and public relations from the perspective of the oil industry. The museum was well done (I'm guessing there is a substantial amount of money in the oil business) and we did learn a lot.
The device used to transfer people and supplies from helicopters or ships onto the oil rig.
The device used in the event something goes terribly wrong. There wasn't any mention in any of the exhibits about dealing with blowouts and issues such as that with the BP spill in the Gulf a few years ago.
Outer Space
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| today's sunrise |
Today we were lucky to be given a personal tour of Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center outside of Houston. Our tour guide was Russell Derrick, a friend of our son. Russell works in Mission Control as a biomedical engineer. We spent the morning with Russell touring a large building where there is a full size mock-up of the International Space Station that is used for training the astronauts. He took us to Mission Control where we were able to go onto the floor of the area where the actual monitoring of all aspects of the station is done. There were very large screens with live video feeds from the parts of the station were displayed as well as a world map showing the location of the station in flight. While we were in the control room area the station traveled from Alaska to South America.
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| Russell showing us his spot in mission control |
Part of our tour included a visit to the old mission control room that was used during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo flights. While we were on the tour we were introduced to a Canadian astronaut who was also giving someone a tour. He offered to take the picture of our tour group (all three of us) at the Flight Director position in the old Mission Control room.
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| A new rule - never have your picture taken next to an astronaut |
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