This weekend, Karen and I went down to Fort Lauderdale to check out the exhibition of Tutankhaten, a/k/a Tutankhamun, a/k/a Nebkheperure, a/k/a King Tut. Sadly, photographs were not permitted, so I don't have any to put up here. I enjoyed it, but was a bit disappointed that they didn't have even one of Tut's seven coffins and sarcophagi (he was like a giant Matryoshka doll).

On the way back, since it wasn't too far out of our way, we stopped at the Kennedy Space Center. It turned out that we had to pay admission even to get into the rocket garden. Security was tighter than any airport I've been to, and of course I was loaded down with all my electronic gadgets, all of which I had to turn on and demonstrate that they were in fact working phones and PDAs, and not bomb-containing simulations.

In the rocket garden, I discovered that the enormous rocket, above, which I'd seen in Google Earth (here it is on Google Maps) was not in fact a Saturn V, but the Saturn 1B, just over half as big. The Saturn V was in its own building, each stage separated by a few feet.

Damn, that is one big rocket. And it pisses me off that decades ago, we could build twenty of them and land six manned missions on the moon — but now they're saying we might be able to get a robotic explorer there by the end of the decade, to scope out landing sites for future manned expeditions. Did we suddenly get stupider and less capable?