My son and I are on a quest to visit all 30 MLB parks, and our first trip to Houston over Labor Day weekend finally gave me the opportunity to check Johnson Space Center off my bucket list. As a huge aviation enthusiast and space nerd, I’ve visited Huntsville, Kennedy, the Udvar-Hazy Center, and quite a few other aviation and space museums. Of the three major NASA visitor facilities, Houston was the last one I had yet to visit.
And honestly? I left slightly disappointed.

Let me start with the positive: there are some absolutely incredible artifacts here. Faith 7 and the Apollo 17 command module are phenomenal. N905NA is an amazing piece of aviation history. And seeing the Saturn V — especially knowing it is the only Saturn V that remains flight-ready — is genuinely awe-inspiring.

In my opinion, the single biggest draw of Johnson Space Center is Mission Control.

And they should lean into that hard. Houston isn’t simply another place with historic NASA hardware. This is where some of the most consequential moments in human spaceflight history played out. The Mission Control tour was, without question, the highlight of our visit. It was incredibly well done and absolutely worth the trip by itself.
Frankly, I think Mission Control should be the flagship attraction of the entire facility.

Instead, the visitor experience seems to put an enormous amount of emphasis on vehicles and artifacts — and Houston simply can't compete with Huntsville and Kennedy in that department.

Rocket “Park” needs some serious love
I’ve seen the rocket parks at Huntsville and Kennedy, and they are leaps and bounds ahead of Houston’s.
That’s not a knock on the history of the hardware. It’s a knock on how it is being presented. I am NOT surprised they didn’t get a shuttle.

The Saturn V deserves better, too.

The fact that the only Saturn V that remains flight-ready is sitting inside what looks like a tired, rusty warehouse is honestly a shame. Huntsville’s Saturn V is, in my opinion, displayed far better and makes a much greater impact on the visitor.

Houston has incredible hardware, but too much of it feels like it's simply there rather than being properly showcased.

The same goes for many of the outdoor artifacts. There’s an incredible orbiter access arm sitting outside — an extraordinarily important piece of shuttle-era history — and most visitors barely give it a second glance.
That’s a missed opportunity.

The visitor center feels disjointed
Space Center Houston itself is a decent facility, but the overall presentation felt somewhat bizarre to me.
A lot of exhibits and artifacts seem to be packed into the same general spaces, and the experience can feel cluttered and disjointed rather than telling a cohesive story.

For a facility associated with some of the greatest achievements in human history, I expected a more powerful sense of narrative.

Houston has something nobody else can replicate.
They have something Huntsville and Kennedy don't have in the same way: Mission Control.
That is Houston's ace in the hole. They should absolutely embrace it.

Build the experience around Mission Control. Tell the stories. Explain what happened in that building.
I’m glad I finally went, and the Mission Control tour alone made the trip worthwhile. But as someone who absolutely loves aviation and spaceflight, I came away feeling like Johnson Space Center is sitting on an incredible historical gold mine and isn't doing enough with it.
They don’t need to be Huntsville. They don’t need to be Kennedy.
They need to be Houston.
And Houston should go all-in on Mission Control.

Some footage of last Sunday's Falcon Heavy launch I took with my Nikon P1000 :D!

This started with a podcast. Listening to the Apollo 13 story on Against the Odds got me curious about the code that flew these missions, and I was surprised to learn it had actually been released on GitHub (chrislgarry/Apollo-11, a transcription of Luminary 099, the real program that flew the Lunar Module down on Apollo 11).

This is my attempt to match that code to what actually happened during the descent. It's not perfect, but it scratched the itch, helped me wrap my head around it a little, and left me in awe of the programmers and astronauts who pulled it off.

Three panels, one mission clock:

• The real flight software, running line by line. Click any line for a plain-English breakdown.
• A 3D descent to the surface, braking to touchdown.
• A working DSKY, the actual keypad and display the crew used, you can key in VERB/NOUN commands yourself.

Hit play and it all moves together, code, 3D view, and DSKY tracking the same clock. Turn sound on and you'll actually hear it too, I trimmed real audio from the mission recording (Mission Control, Aldrin, Armstrong) and timed the clips to the moments they really happened: ignition, the 1202 and 1201 alarms, "throttle down," the 60-seconds call, touchdown.

One thing I want to be upfront about since I know this crowd will check: the assembly is verbatim and the phase sequence and audio are real, but the altitude/velocity/fuel numbers on the readouts are a simplified model tuned to match the real profile, not recovered telemetry. I wrote up exactly which parts are which in the Methodology section of the About panel (ABOUT → METHODOLOGY) if you want the details.

https://apollo11mission.com/

Built with Three.js + React. Would genuinely love feedback, especially from anyone who knows AGC assembly better than I do.

I wanted a simple place to check on Roman's progress, so I built this little app. It's a live 3D view of the ~100-day cruise from Earth to Sun–Earth L2: the launch date, Roman's position/speed, and the Moon's position are all real, pulled live from JPL Horizons, with an analytic model (fit to that same real data) filling in wherever live data doesn't reach yet.

Distances are log-compressed so Earth, the Moon, L2, and the Sun can all fit on screen at once - there's a tab in the app breaking down exactly how that compression works.

roman-telescope-tracker.pages.dev - feedback welcome.

My 15-year-old daughter is so interested in space, astronomy, NASA, robotics, and Christiana Koch. She is looking into being an aerospace engineer, astrophysist, or a robotics engineer. How can I support her, give her things to do based off her interests, things she should be doing, daily and things she should have for applying to colleges. She already has her mind set on a college, NCSU.

Could someone send me to a good description of the math behind L2, how it was discovered, and why it’s the best spot for the Roman Telescope?

• I’m a farmer who likes math. I just want to play with the numbers to understand better.
• I don’t trust AI to help with this; it’s gotten so many things wrong from computer science and engineering to some of my basic physics walk through. I prefer YouTube or journals.
• I’ve done a basic search, but can’t find anything comprehensive about the math itself.

Thanks!

"Titan-bound rotorcraft set for launch in 2028"

NASA’s New Horizons heliosphere study program will shut down in October 2026 over $2 million/year in funding that scientists have been begging for. The critical moment is now. Rare and invaluable data on solar winds and the outer solar system will be lost forever. The probe has taken two decades just to get to where it is today; any future attempts to get this data will take a similar amount of time, so this could set our understanding of these phenomena back decades.

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket transits the Sun. The hot gasses from the liquid-fuelled boosters create complex refraction patterns that distort sunlight at lower left. Shockwaves from the rocket's 27 engines emanate in arcs that break up the Sun's outline.

https://bsky.app/profile/theplanetaryguy.com/post/3mucwiw7czc2s

Learn more about the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope:

https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasas-dark-universe-seeking-nancy-grace-roman-space-telescope-launches/

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NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope transits our neighborhood star on its way to unlock the secrets of the universe

Image credit: NASA/John Kraus

https://x.com/johnkrausphotos/status/2094034694358630768

I can't describe all of the feelings from the rocket rumbles to the sonic booms!