I headed out to Cape Canaveral from home early Saturday morning. Less than an hour later I was at Kennedy Space Center. This was one of the places we visited during our '88 trip. I hadn't been there since.
Here's the big logo at the entrance to the Visitor Center. I like the slightly retro feel of the reinstated logo as opposed to the now rarely-seen "old" logo which seemed to try too hard to look "futuristic". Instead its "forward-vision" design is indelibly stylised as 1980's EPCOT-esque "space glam" that went out with Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.
The Rocket Garden was there in '88, and I think a small walk-thru museum. But everything else, like the IMAX movies, the bus tours and the the Shuttle Launch Experience are new. (Well, maybe they had bus tours then too, but we didn't take one.)
Here I am getting on the bus shortly after attending both IMAX films. Yes, they have 2 IMAX theaters. One show is narrated by Tom Cruise and it's all about the International Space Station. It's cool but the better one, in my opinion is the one the Moon Landings, narrated by Tom Hanks. Both are 3-D too...how cool! Some of the scenes in the moon landings film are from actual video taken by the astronauts during their missions, but, since it's IMAX and 3-D, much of it is filmed more recently using actors in spacesuits, moon sets and lots of CGI. Looks so real though, you might think the landings were all faked. I just think it's funny to watch a movie full of fake moon walks at the place responsible for putting the real moon walkers up there in the first place. LOL!
This model was at the Viewing Gantry, a 3 story outdoor platform used to view the launch pads. The model is used by an automated system lighting up points of interest during a recorded explanation of the step-by-step pre-launch procedure.
At the Saturn V Center you get to see an immense Saturn V rocket and all it's stages hanging from the ceiling, view a cool launch simulation from a control center mock-up and a short video/animatronics-ish show depicting the first moon landing.
I spent the whole day from about 10:30 am to almost 5:30 pm there...much longer than I would stay nowadays at a theme park like Universal (since, lets face it, I've seen it all by now there).
As promised, here's a video of my trip there. The theme music is Vangelis - Creation Du Monde.