John Buck entertains, teaches and engages classrooms of middle school students for an hour with nary a screen in sight. How is the miracle achieved? The feat is due to Lagoonology, the interactive, room-size board game he invented.
Ten-year-old Pat Duggin had a backyard seat for what he describes as free fireworks from Cape Canaveral. The son of an Air Force chief master sergeant, he has vivid memories of seeing the night sky burst into light with the Pioneer 10 probe heading toward Jupiter aboard an Atlas-Centaur rocket in 1972.
Planning for a crew’s health in deep space is as essential as for a successful rocket launch, experts say. Researchers at the Florida Institute of Technology and the University of Central Florida have active roles in that work to ensure astronauts’ physical and mental health for the 140-million-mile trek from Earth to Mars. Radiation, isolation, distance, gravity fields and closed environments are the high-risk factors of all space exploration that scientists take into account while planning for the great crewed journeys.
Historical Green Gables, saved from demolition by the efforts of a small band of determined fans, is a living history museum that tells the story of Melbourne’s early days.
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Bringing a circa 1904 riverfront house that still had most of its original wood framing and flooring into the 21st century would be a very messy and complex undertaking. In large part it would be made worthwhile by the fact that it overlooks the space center and the ever-changing waters of the Indian River with all its wildlife.
Midweek evenings are not usually busy at restaurants, but you wouldn’t know it from the crowd gathered a recent Wednesday at Café Margaux. The Cocoa Village restaurant was hosting a gustative journey of pairings created by Margaux Executive Chef Erol Tugrul with tastings of rare single-parcel French malbecs from Chateau Chambert, one of the first vineyards in the world to embrace the growing trend of truly organic and biodynamic winemaking.
In recent years there has been a booming interest in Florida native plants. What’s the attraction? First off, they require little maintenance. There’s some TLC when they are first planted, but after that they don’t require fertilizer, trimming and very little watering.
The unobtrusive blue sign by U.S. 1 in Palm Shores provides little indication of the excellent hospital behind it. Like other excellent healthcare facilities, this hospital boasts of an ICU and nursery, outdoor spaces where patients can chill out and a corps of compassionate, seasoned staff and volunteers eager to help patients, who, by the way, never have to file insurance claims and are never expected to pay a penny for the care.
A fisherman heads out onto Blue Cypress Lake from Middleton’s Fish Camp near Vero Beach as the sun rises. Lined with cypress trees, the lake has great fishing in wonderfully clean water. Florida’s Most Beautiful Lake is also a popular osprey nesting area and part of the Blue Cypress Conservation Area and the Great Florida Birding and Wildlife Trail.
The Hubble Space Telescope 340 miles in orbit above the Earth has mesmerized stargazers with images of the universe’s beauty and mysteries for decades and is still going strong.
The first observatory designed to be serviced in space, it is considered to be the most productive scientific instrument ever built. Hubble’s saga is as much one of high drama as it is scientific discovery. Its story arcs with tragedy, heroes and ultimate victory over the years after its launch and five service trips — all launched from the Kennedy Space Center.
It’s hard to avoid space and aeronautics topics in a magazine based on the Space Coast.
So even though this isn’t our annual aviation and space issue, we have two stories of interest to readers interested in space and aviation.
Test pilot, Top Gun, Marine Corps lieutenant colonel and now CEO of Cape Canaveral-based Aerodyne Industries, Allen also piloted Columbia in 1994 and was its mission commander in 1996. He has logged more than 900 hours in space. His time as a test pilot and Top Gun fighter pilot in more than 30 different aircraft puts his total flight hours at 6,000.
About four years ago, at the direction of regional
planners and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, coastal municipalities undertook studies to examine the long-term consequences of storm flooding and sea level rise. Even the more optimistic projections are unsettling. Many view sea-level rise as the threat from the Atlantic Ocean. However, flood maps and experts agree it is the related rising waters in the Banana River and Indian River Lagoon that pose the most threat.
If William Shakespeare were to meander through Rockledge Drive, he would come upon a structure very familiar to his time. On the leafy road perfect for unhurried drives sits an architectural gem The Bard would have instantly recognized but that is rarely seen in Brevard: a Tudor mansion.
