The mood in the space center was celebratory. Fifty years ago humans first set foot on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission, and NASA was ready to party! We weren’t there on Saturday when the center was open until midnight with food, activities and live music, but on Thursday when we were there you couldn’t miss feeling the excitement in the air or miss seeing the preparations for the upcoming festivities. There were many moon-landing-related displays and happenings at the center that day, along with information about future Mars missions and the International Space Station (ISS).

Jackson and I had a lot of fun here. We saw an entertaining demonstration of what it’s like to live on the ISS (including how astronauts use the bathroom). We got a sense of the disorientation you feel in space by standing still in a vessel that rotates around you. We rode an outdoor tram to a huge warehouse containing the Saturn V rocket, where we did a self-guided tour to learn about all of the stages of rocket fall-off during propulsion to the moon. We saw moon buggies and, from a theater inside the space center, watched the news footage that aired live on household TV sets across the nation during the Apollo 11 mission. Outside, we also went into a full-size airplane and into the space shuttle on top of it that it was built to carry. There were a lot of interactive games for kids, which Jackson really enjoyed, and he even got to touch moon rock! I was honestly impressed by Space Center Houston.

Did you know that the astronauts on the moon didn’t see stars in the sky? Light was reflecting off the moon’s surface. It’s like the way that we don’t see stars in the sky here on Earth during the day.