[Kal (Andrew)]

I've just arrived back home after spending the entire month of September in the USA on holidays. While over there, I got so visit some interesting Space related places, including two Smithsonian Air and Space Museums, in Washington DC & Virginia, and also the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

My first stop was the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. The highlight there for me was definately seeing the Apollo 11 command module Columbia. Other highlights included seeing Mercury and Gemini modules. They also had life size models of the Hubble telescope and Skylab here, both these things are huge!

The next stop for me was the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Virginia, about an hours drive from the one in Washington DC. The most eye catching display here for me definately had to be the Space shuttle on display. While it wasn't a complete operational shuttle that went into space, it was the shuttle that they used to test the flight characteristics on during development.

A week later I was down in Florida and I visited the Kennedy Space Center, where I was privileged to see not one, but two Space shuttles on the launchpad preparing for the scheduled October 8 launch to service Hubble. This mission has since then been postponed - "Unfortunately, the Hubble Space Telescope spacecraft suffered a hardware failure in the Science Instrument Command and Data Handling (SIC&DH) module during the weekend of September 27-28, causing NASA to delay the STS-125 mission to early next year"

A couple of pics: