Cole
Zero to 5,000 in Two and a Half Minutes

On the way to Kennedy Space Center, we saw an exciting building, the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB). On the side of the building there is an American flag with six foot stars, point to point. The stripes are 13 feet wide and the flag is 209 feet long and 110 feet wide.

The building was built to assemble the Saturn V rocket. The Saturn V rocket is 363 feet tall. ThatÕs why the VAB is so tall. We learned that the Saturn V weighs about 6.3 million pounds. It has three stages.

The first stage has five F1 rocket engines. The engines burn for two and a half minutes and get the rock going 5,000 mph.	Stage Two has three J1 engines and they burn for six and a half minutes and make the rocket go 17,500 mph.
Stage three has one B2 engine. This stage was used to escape the EarthÕs gravity and get the astronauts close enough to the moon to deploy the capsule.	The capsule is also called the command module. The command module takes the astronauts get to the moon and back to Earth.

On my tour of the Rocket Garden, I found out that the rockets on display are real. Every rocket flown by the U.S. Space Program sits in launch position, for anyone driving by to see. This was my second time on this trip and my strongest memory from this trip is the Rocket Garden. Seeing it for the second time made me realize how unbelievable it is that people could build things like these rockets.