LV's not my home ...

Though I visit Las Vegas biennially, I've never experienced summer there. December in Las Vegas is nice: the air is cool and crisp, the skies are clear and blue, the Bellagio is festive with elaborate Christmas decorations, the streets are busy yet managable. August in LV is a different story. In the words of Ben, it's "104 friggin' degrees and there are naked women everywhere". It is hot, hot, hot and the air is thick with cigarette smoke, both inside and outside. There is no room to move on the streets and people are cranky and rushing to get back into an air conditioned building. The Star Trek Experience is an oasis, however. More on that later.

PERT: Coolest Place on Earth

The first stop today was Caltech, which Peter later described as the coolest place on Earth. To encourage networking, Jet Propulsion Laboratories employees get free access to the college fitness center. Instead of internships or coops with commercial interests, Caltech students do SURFs (summer undergraduate research fellowships), about a quarter of them at JPL about five miles away. The focus is not on making money, but on pushing discoveries in science and as training for future academic careers. Caltech is a small campus and packed about as tight as it can be. There is no quad. Craig reported that Caltech is also the wealthiest campus he has ever seen. All the buildings are in excellent shape. And those that are not get torn down and rebuilt. Many corners of the campus are under construction. In the photo above, you can see the trees behind the wall are in wood planters, a temporary location until they get moved to their new home.

The second college the boys toured is a very small -- 720 students -- engineering and science school. It's ranked in the top five in the country on a number of lists. But after Caltech, Peter was not impressed.

The carrot has been dangled ... it remains to be seen if it has a lasting effect.

PERT: The VLA

The VLA (Very Large Array, Peter's favoritest official acronym ever) of radio telescopes is on a 7,000' plain west of Socorro, New Mexico. The array was built by the the National Science Foundation and is the largest in the world. Seven 25-meter dishes each sit on one leg of a symmetrical Y shape for 21 dishes altogether. Each leg is 13 miles long. The dishes move on rails. As in Florida, the dishes were assembled and are maintained in a large assembly building on the rail system.

The boys covered 759 miles, their second-longest day of driving. They got off to a good start on an 80-mph west-Texas interstate devoid of traffic, but soon enough were doing 55 on two-lane roads in the middle of nowhere. While in the middle of nowhere, Peter made Craig take a video of the radio scanning for stations. The radio just kept looping without finding anything, which Peter found highly amusing for some reason. The NSF sought to put the VLA in the middle of nowhere to minimize radio interference and, according to Craig, they did a fine job. The cell phones did not work for hundreds of miles, and Craig suspects the NSF has a deal with the cell phone companies to stay away from the VLA.They crossed the continental divide soon after leaving the VLA and ended up in Flagstaff.

PERT: Evacuating Houston

14,000 people work at the Johnson Space Center, 1,000 more than at the Kennedy Space Center (but we don't know how many people work at the Air Force Base, where most the activity happens). In addition to astronaut training, the international space station is managed from Houston. In short, anything to do with manned space flight is managed in Houston. Anything to do with unmanned space flight is managed on the cape or somewhere else, like the JPL in California. The photo above is the Gemini, Apollo and early space shuttle mission control. Forty-two missions were run from here. But not the launches. So the Apollo launch control in Florida controlled events until the rocket lifted off the ground. Then Houston took over. The curvature in the photo is an illusion caused by stitching together several photographs: the workstations are in straight rows. The new mission control, which visitors can see if they come on weekends, is right behind the screens on the far wall.

Arriving at the Johnson Space Center as soon as it opened, the boys immediately got on the tram for the tour of the Apollo mission control, etc. Before they were done with the two-hour tour it was announced the space center was closing because of Tropical Storm Edouard. Here is how you evacuate Houston during a hurricane: use both directions of the interstate freeways to get away....

PERT: Cape Canaveral Air Force Station

On Saturday the boys toured the launch sites at the Air Force base south of Kennedy that in some cases predate the space center. Above is the launch site used for two flights, Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom (plus prior unmanned tests). After those launches, recognizing that history had been made, the site was left untouched and is now a museum. The building on the left is called a block house. With two foot thick walls, a five foot thick roof, one foot thick glass windows and two sets of steel blast doors, the blockhouse would more accurately be called a bunker. Underground wires connect the block house to the rocket 300' away. The blockhouse is quite small, yet held 117 people on the day of the launch. The computer is a Burroughs and came complete with pull-out ashtrays at every work station. The RAM chips are about the size of a modern rack server. The whole double-rack of RAM added up to 1024 bits, not bytes, not kilobytes.

Craig admitted to being a bit sad as they left Florida to return home. Today they are headed to Houston and will spend a day or two touring the NASA facilities there. About a third of the return trip will be spent in California, touring even more NASA facilities and a couple of colleges.

PERT: Kennedy Space Center

The boys spent the day at the Kennedy Space Center and will return again tomorrow. They are acclimatizing ... it's about 90 degrees, very humid and most of the sights are outside.

This is a Saturn I rocket, a short milestone on the way to the Saturn V rocket that launched the Apollo moon shots.

This is a Saturn V rocket, one of three left over when the Apollo program was canceled. The Saturn V -- the most powerful rocket built to date -- had about the same power as an atom bomb. The boys were awed by the size.

Here is one of the two Apollo and space shuttle launch pads. About 300,000 gallons of water drop from the water tower to the fire chutes during the twenty seconds the rocket exhaust reaches the chutes. The main purpose is to reduce the sound, which is loud enough to destroy the shuttle. Even so the sound is so loud it kills any unprotected animals (people too) within 800 feet. The white pole at the top is a lighting rod. The cape is full of lightning rods.

Amazing stuff.

PERT: The Eagle Has Landed

... or, in other words, the boys have reached their destination: Cocoa Beach, Florida. The plan for this afternoon was to cool their toes in the Atlantic. Tomorrow they will spend the day at the Kennedy Space Center.