Johnson Space Center

While manned US space missions such as the Apollo and shuttle programs have their high-profile launches from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the planning and most of the training happens at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC), just outside of Houston.

The glory, guts and cigarette butts of the NASA experience have been theme-park packaged as Space Center Houston, the tourist gateway to the JSC. Heavy commercial sponsorship has led to exhibits featuring Saturn automobiles with 'space age plastic components' and a collection of Lego rockets (with kits for making them available at the giftstore).

Despite all the hype, however, you can find some actual evidence that the space program had a function beyond marketing, including Faith-7, the Mercury capsule used to orbit the earth; the command module from Apollo 17, used on the last trip by humans to the moon in 1972; and a trove of actual moon rocks, including one you can touch. You can also see Mission Control, the space shuttle training mock-up, zero-gravity labs and more, but to see them all involves several 90-minute tours. Combine the complexities of the schedule with the fact that usually you have to wait in lines for the trams, and you'll soon determine that it will take most of the day to see the JSC. Visitors have much easier access to adjacent Rocket Park, where tiny Redstone rockets are dwarfed by a giant Saturn 5 used in the Apollo program.