Mighty Pen in the Hand of a Word Lover

Travels for a Saturday

Now, back to our regular programming.

Today, we take you to the very secret Pasadena area historic jewel (no, it’s not related to the Tournament of Roses or even Greene & Greene), no, it’s JPL. It’s full name NASA/CalTech Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This place has been following otherworldly missions for a long time. You can tell because the buildings are dated but that doesn’t stop you from expressing wonder at Mission Control which lately has seen NASA’s Mars rovers and other spacecraft. You can also see the vehicle assembly plant. Count your lucky stars if you see a space vehicle being assembled at that time. In this case it was the Europa Clipper ready for it’s mission to the moon of Jupiter in search of micro bacterial life. We saw smaller robots, even full size replicas of the rovers currently on Mars. Things we missed but would have liked to go and visit included the solar system missions and several 3-D movies. It’s just amazing and I seriously doubt anyone but the strongest, fastest visitors would see everything. Just seeing and doing the activities, reading up on the missions, and visiting the JPL store for souvenirs would take several days.

Now for the practical stuff. The event is called Explore JPL and it requires tickets. Tickets were free. You signed up through JPL’s website clicking on a link on their events page. Unfortunately, it was only this weekend (April 29-30). However, this is their biggest public engagement event so look for it to return again next year. This event used to be called JPL open house and it was huge. Many, many people. Hence, the tickets. They were also timed entry. When you go make sure you get there fairly early for your time. Heck, try to get there early no matter what. The long line moves fast so don’t be too alarmed. Make sure you bring government identification that matches the name on the ticket and of course, belongs to that person. When you signed up you had to give the names of each member of your family—up to 5 members in your party.

JPL is not 100% ADA accessible so keep that in mind. Even then, there’s still much to see for a party with ADA considerations. There are ADA mobility vans to take you point to point and boy, there’s plenty of those. Make sure you pick up an ADA map when you first get in. Make use of the friendly JPL volunteers in red shirts for directions and to call the mobility vans.

There are quite a number of portable (trailers) and permanent restrooms, so don’t worry about that. Security were present in number including K9 units. Make sure you bring water and maybe snacks. If you want (and I strongly suggest it) bring money—and plenty of it. Not just for food and snacks (frozen lemonade sure looked good) but for the JPL store. I guarantee you’ll find something.


Book to read:

Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam
Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly
The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
Failure is Not an Option by Gene Kranz
And I highly recommend perusing all of the NASA webpages, especially JPL’s. http://www.nasa.gov and http://jpl.nasa.gov

other fun books I enjoyed include books by Buzz Aldrin and Chris Hadfield