Written on October 18, 2026. Covers my visit to Space Center Houston.
After visiting SpaceX at Boca Chica, we drove north to Houston to go to JSC, the command center for all of the Apollo missions, the current home of ISS operations and mission control, and location of Space Center Houston, with one of the 3 remaining Saturn V Rockets.
The space center opens in a big atrium, with an Apollo Lunar Module and Shuttle RS-25 Engine on display. There are also scale models of the SLS rocket, a to-scale Skylab, and a ton of artifacts and scenes from NASA history.
The most notable items are the 3 flown capsules, one from each major space race manned program. They have on display the Mercury 9 capsule "Faith 7", the capsule flown on Gemini 5, and the last manned craft to have flown to the moon, the Apollo 17 capsule "America".
You can take a short ride over to the Saturn V building, and see some full size vehicles on display before entering. They have the Little Joe 2, a rocket designed to test the escape systems for Apollo craft, and a Mercury Redstone rocket, the first crewed American rocket. The coolest things on display outside of the Saturn V building however are the engines, with a real F-1 and J-2 from the Saturn V sitting there with no guards.
The main show is inside, with the full stack Saturn 5 on display. The scale doesn't come across in the photos, but it is an incredible machine.
There were a couple of other high points here, there are a couple of moon rocks on display, a full scale replica Space Shuttle called Independence sits on top of the real NASA Shuttle transport 747 aircraft. Visitors can go inside the shuttle and see the payload bay, avionics, and tools that crews had available to them.
There's also a flown and reused Falcon 9 booster outside, which flew 2 resupply missions to the ISS before being retired for this exhibit.
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