My spring break just ended, and I had gone to Florida with my family. I went to St Augustine, the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral and Universal Orlando. All of those places we fun, but my favorite place we went was the Kennedy Space Center. This is where all of the Apollo rockets went off, platform 38 and platform 39.

When I went there I got to see a lot of cool things. My family and I got to see how Apollo 13 got started; we got to see the space shuttle that took 33 strips to space, my dad and brother got to see how the simulation of the rocket feels when it first starts, and we got to go on a bus tour to see where all the platforms were.

When they started Apollo 13, they had a difficult time getting it started. The space shuttle wouldn’t start, and the fuse would blow up. It took 12 years for them to have the rocket ready to go into space. It finally went off on April 11, 1970.

Apollo 11 orbited the moon to see if it was safe to go on the moon, and three men went up there, Pilot Fred Haise, Pilot Jack Swigert and Jim Lovell. When they were up in space, something went wrong; the oxygen tank exploded. To get them back, the space station had to shoot up an oxygen tank. It took a little while for it to work.

Eventually it worked and the men came home. That was interesting to learn, because I never knew they had difficulty getting the rocket ready.

Apollo 11 is when they had the first person land on the moon — Neil Armstrong. His first words when he stepped on the moon were, “Tranquility, the Eagle has landed. One small step for man; one giant leap for mankind. There were two other men on the Apollo 11, Michael Collins and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin on July 16, 1969.

When they were on the moon, they hit a golfball off the moon. Unlike Apollo 13, Apollo 11 had a successful trip to the moon and back.

My favorite thing about the Kennedy Space Center was the building where we saw information on the astronauts, how the seats worked, how their spacesuits worked, how they slept and how they went to the bathroom. That is where I got to learn about Apollo 13. It was fun to see how they slept. They slept vertically, which upraised me.

I guess it was because of the gravity. The space shuttle that went to space 33 times was interesting to learn about. Someone wouldn’t think there would be one space ship going up into space 33 times. There would be some questions about it, like what if it blows up? What if something goes wrong?

Why would they have it go up 33 times instead of just one? All good questions.

If you ever go to Florida that is a good place to visit. There are lots of things you can do and lots of things you can learn.