Yesterday we visited the Kennedy Space Center. The admission fee is high, but NASA provides a good show. Many of the exhibits including a “rocket garden” are at the main visitor center. Buses take you past the famous vehicle assembly building, to a viewing station for the shuttle launch pads, and to the moon rocket museum that has the various units of a Saturn V rocket mounted horizontally overhead. This exhibit makes the building very long indeed. The assembly building and launch pads for the shuttle were first built for the moon rockets, and although they are enormously significant historical sites, the facilities remain active and evolving. This morning we canoed on the St. Johns River. This is a peculiar stream that flows a couple of hundred miles north in east Florida and through Jacksonville into the Atlantic Ocean. We canoed where it is a narrow stream in dry weather, but it sports a floodplain that is a mile wide and largely in prairie. Some of this ground is grazed and some is wild. It is all very scenic. This afternoon we returned to NASA for a few hours to make a last stop at the Astronauts’ Hall of Fame. We were growing up during the “space race” and clearly remember the drama of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. The quest for a moon landing seemed a nearly impossible one. We dreamed of success, gasped at failures and disasters, and roared with approval at successes. We remember our first manned flight, the first orbital flight, and then the series of increasingly difficult Gemini missions. We gasped at the size of the Saturn rocket and the complexity of the space vehicles for the lunar missions. Three stages for propulsion and the service unit with the capsule and the lunar module sections. We listened closely as the pilots uncoupled and re-coupled the units in space to allow approach and landing on the moon. Finally we listened and watched the news as the spider descended to the lunar service and men walked the lunar surface. We waited anxiously for their successful return. During the Apollo 13 mission we watched and waited anxiously and prayed for the survival of a few good men. Today it seems silly, but when the oxygen tank exploded and the crew made some impolite comments, newsmen remarked that this was not NASA approved language. It was also not approved for broadcast, but such is the hazard of live coverage. There are times when swearing is appropriate to reflect the severity of a situation, and this was one of them. Swearing draws and focuses attention. Perhaps the astronauts should have had their tea, reflected, and then calmly discussed why their ship was disintegrating. It may by then have been gone, but at least no one’s ears would have been upset by the words of serious men managing a difficult problem.