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After touring through Canada in mid 2018 ( retirement gift from the misses ) we spent 3 days down in Florida at the Kennedy Space Centre ( the wife was bored out of her brain ).After visiting all the Apollo exhibitions, on the last day we did a 4 hour round trip out to the Cape Canaveral Airforce Base and visited the old Mercury launch complex , Firing room and museum ( so strange as this area is only 4km from the KSC but off limits to civilians so we had to have security checks in place before we could enter the base )
Most of the original Mercury Redstone infrastructure is still there ( excluding launch tower ) but they have erected a full size mock up Redstone rocket with Mercury capsule anchored to the original launch pad , block house and firing room still there , concrete blast screens , cable trenches with all the old armoured cables still intact with checker plate lids , old signage etc... a real blast from the past pardon the pun
Firing room is definitely late 50s early 60s technology, spring loaded Bakelite push buttons , electromechanical relays , old gauges etc... and an original sign on the firing button with arrow
Only the chimps , Shepard and Grissom were launched from this pad LC5 , the Atlas orbital launches with Glenn and others were launched about a km away up the coast at LC14
A most enjoyable trip
I’ve read the book “ The Right Stuff” and enjoyed every page, a great author Tom Wolfe , the old movie was a let down
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