Guided Tour of Rocket Garden at Kennedy Space Center, March 3, 2014 [CC]
Channel: Angela Brett
Date: 30/12/2018

Our tour guide Bruce shows us the various rockets, spacecraft and other hardware in the rocket garden of Kennedy Space Center in March 2014. I transcribed most of what the tour guide said and put it in closed captions, so turn those on if you have trouble hearing over the wind. There’s also information on all of this at https://www.kennedyspacecenter.com/blog/rocket-garden

Here are some signs seen in the video:

Chasing the Russian Bear
Space was just for science fiction fans until the world’s first man-made satellite — the USSR’s Sputnik — beep beep beeped down at us from orbit. [Not on the sign: here is a song about that: https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/album/surprise-gunnar-madsen/66964158?i=66964119&mt=1&app=music&at=1001lM7h] At the time, there were many views about the exploration of space. “War Hawks” imagined a future with orbiting bomb platforms and spies in the sky; “Peace Doves” saw it as the dawn of a new beginning for humankind.

Either way, America had to get something in orbit in a hurry if we were to be included in a race that had started without us. Atop a Redstone rocket, the military’s two-stage Jupiter was stacked with an added fourth stage. Re-named Juno I, the four-stage rocket pushed the 11-pound Explorer I satellite into orbit on January 31, 1958.

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 Inventing Everything
Not since World War II had Americans been so galvanized to a single goal as we were when pointed toward the moon by President Kennedy. In order to fulfill NASA’s mission to put an American on the moon before the end of the decade, we had to invent everything from scratch, including the Mission Control procedures, the tracking and communication systems, and even test methods and equipment to prove it all worked. 

There was a lot that had to be accomplished in a short amount of time, and we had to do it with rudimentary tools: computers the size of boxcars, slide rulers instead of calculators, and communications systems not much better than jungle drums — at least in the beginning.

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Aiming at the Heavens
With the newfound power and guidance combination of the Atlas-Agena system, we now had the ability to successfully aim unmanned exploratory missions at other worlds. Teams of scientists, who could only explore the heavens with telescopes until now, set about building robot scouts to extend our curious eyes and ears into space.

In January 1962, the Atlas-Agena launched Ranger 3 and sent it racing toward the moon. The plan was to capture and send home pictures of the moon until impact with the lunar surface. But Ranger 3 missed the target and headed for the Sun. There were eight missions in the Ranger proram. They sent back more than 11000 detailed pictures of the lunar surface, including close-ups of the Sea of Tranquility where Apollo 11 would touch down in 1969.

See also my other videos from Kennedy Space Center: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA4BA1D3F41FC922C

And Johnson Space Center: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJ-l6mr1dW0jFmdibMXiMEf3BNmYj3Vbc