Image: California Science Center (8089345453)
Description: Paying a visit to California Science Center on Saturday, 13 October 2012, as I await its latest spacecraft arrival, Space Shuttle Endeavour, scheduled for the evening. (As it would turn out, the Space Shuttle would not arrive until midday the next day.) California Science Center already has other key American manned spacecraft, and adding Endeavour would very nicely complement the existing collection. In front is an Apollo command module; intended to be Apollo 18 and flown to the moon in 1973, it instead became a spare when Apollo was terminated after Apollo 17, and it was launched on a smaller Saturn 1B rocket in 1975 for docking with a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. At the termination of the Apollo program, there were three spare Saturn V rockets and Apollo spacecraft, that would've allowed three extra trips to the moon; one of the surplus Saturn Vs was used to launch the Skylab space station, and the other two Apollo - Saturn V combinations are preserved at Johnson Space Center in Houston and Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Just behind the Apollo is the Gemini 11 capsule. Smaller than the Apollo, it had room for two astronauts, who lived aboard for two days; even the act of standing up would have required the opening of a hatch and a spacewalk. Behind the Gemini, and not visible, is a single-passenger Mercury capsule. This museum's Mercury is the Mercury-Redstone 2, which made a 16-minute suborbital space flight in 1961 with a chimpanzee on board, in preparation for a human flight. While this was not the first spaceship to fly with a live animal on board (the Soviets had Sputnik II, with a dog on board, in 1958), it was the first spaceship to bring that animal back alive (Sputnik II had no provisions for returning the dog to Earth alive - the dog died in orbit).
Title: California Science Center (8089345453)
Credit: California Science Center
Author: InSapphoWeTrust from Los Angeles, California, USA
Usage Terms: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0
License: CC BY-SA 2.0
License Link: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0
Attribution Required?: Yes
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