"As a Smithsonian affiliate, we work with their guidelines as to what guests can touch or not. The 70-foot-long (21-meter) walkway though, was too long to display intact and so the remaining span was available for use in the Space Shop. In January 2017, part of the swing arm was incorporated into an exhibit honoring the lives of the fallen Apollo 1 astronauts in the visitor complex's Apollo/Saturn V Center. Guests could walk across the grounded metal gantry and look into the white room, the small, once-environmentally-controlled chamber that served as the interface between the launch umbilical tower (LUT-1) and the Apollo command module atop a Saturn V rocket. Swing arm 9, which five decades ago was mounted 320 feet (100 meters) above the launch pad's surface, was in recent years displayed outdoors in the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex's Rocket Garden. The iconic artifact is one of several new interactive additions to the 15,372-square-foot (1,428-square-meter) Space Shop, which now reopened, continues to offer NASA-logo apparel, mission patches, spacecraft models, freeze-dried space food and more. "This brings a piece of history to the gift shop." "I think it awesome to be able to go upstairs and actually walk across the actual Apollo 11 gantry," said Therrin Protze, the chief operating officer of the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida, in an interview with collectSPACE. The red grate swing arm now bridges the Space Shop's second floor, offering guests the opportunity to walk in the footsteps of the first humans to step on the moon. Forget the amusement park staple "exit through the gift shop" - the newly-renovated store at NASA's Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex now has a historic exit off the planet.īilled as the "world's largest space shop," the souvenir store now features a part of the launch pad gantry that Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins walked across to begin the first moon landing mission nearly 50 years ago.
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