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| - My favorite part of this center is the lunar module. Let it sink in for a minute that there's only a handful of these modules -- monuments to this peak in technological achievement. Yet here lies one of them, hanging out in Northeast Ohio -- home of the NASA Glenn Center, birthplace of aviation and perhaps the most important place in the history of avionics.
I just look at this lunar module and notice how cramped it is in there. What I see is how in Apollo 1, three astronauts died, cooked alive in a fire in this sardine can. In Apollo 13, again, there were three astronauts with very limited space who managed to rewire things in the nick of time to make it home alive, aided only by calculations on paper and slide-rule from Houston control with no 'apps' for that situation back then.
This is a great place to visit and in the vicinity, there's the William Mather, USS Cod, Rock HOF and Voinovich park. Take pictures with your iPhone, which incidentally, has more access to computing power than the lunar module and Houston control of old ever had.
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