Places to visit

A number of museums and visitors centers have information and material related to the STS-107 accident and Columbia‘s crew.

The Patricia Huffman Smith “Remembering Columbia” Museum, Hemphill, Texas. Hemphill and Sabine County, Texas were “Ground Zero,” where the remains of Columbia‘s crew and the majority of the debris from Columbia‘s crew module fell to earth. The museum commemorates Columbia, her crew, and the local people whose selfless sacrifices forever united their community with the NASA family. Includes many personal artifacts that were recovered from the accident and donated by the families of Columbia‘s crew.

Forever Remembered, in the Atlantis building at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. A moving memorial to the lost space shuttles Challenger and Columbia and their fourteen crew members. The exhibit includes personal items from the crewmembers and the only debris from Challenger and Columbia on public display.

American Space Museum and The U. S. Space Walk of Fame are located in historic Titusville, Florida, directly across the Indian River from Kennedy Space Center. The Museum hosts amazing artifacts from the dawn of the US space program up through the Shuttle era, many of which are from the personal collections of the men and women who worked at the Cape and at KSC. Here you’ll get a feeling of personal connection to what it was like to work on the space program that you can’t experience anywhere else.

The Kennedy Space Center Visitor Center is the gateway to launch operations at KSC. The exhibits include the original Mercury mission control room, the space shuttle Atlantis, the lunar module originally intended for Apollo 15, the Apollo 14 Command Module Kitty Hawk, the Shuttle Launch Experience, the Astronaut Hall of Fame, and one of the last Saturn V launch vehicles. Tours originating from the Visitor Center explore Cape Canaveral and the launch facilities at KSC. You can even have lunch with an astronaut or take a tour with former Shuttle Launch Director Mike Leinbach!

Space Center Houston connects to the Johnson Space Center, the world of Mission Control and the home of the astronaut corps. The many displays include the Apollo 17 command module America, a lunar rover, Skylab trainer, a Saturn V rocket, and other artifacts from America’s space program. Visitors can take a tram tour of JSC and visit the mockup training building, the historic Mission Control Operations Room from the Apollo era, and the current mission control room for the International Space Station.