Unused Apollo booster enshrined

PEARLINGTON, Miss. >> A massive rocket booster that never made it to space instead made its way Tuesday to Mississippi’s Infinity Science Center after a carefully orchestrated dayslong move over land and water from New Orleans.

The rocket booster was part of the Saturn V rocket used to support the Apollo moon program. This particular piece of equipment was intended for the Apollo 19 moon trip, which was canceled.

Instead it sat at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans — where it was constructed — for years.

To get to Mississippi, the rocket booster traveled about 40 miles by waterway and 10 miles by road. It was loaded onto a barge in New Orleans and traveled via canal to the Pearl River, where it was floated to the Stennis Space Center and then transported by road to the science center nearby.

The road move required closing off parts of Interstate 10 as the booster rocket crept along at 3 mph on modular trailers made up of about 300 tires.

“It has now safely arrived,” said John Wilson, the center’s executive director.

9/11 center moving to larger space

NEW YORK >> A tribute center that’s been hosting tours led by volunteers with personal ties to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks is moving and expanding.

“Our mission here is to give a voice to those who lost their voice,” said co-founder Lee Ielpi, a retired firefighter who had carried his firefighter son’s body out of the debris. “Here it’s firsthand knowledge, from the people who experienced it.”

On Tuesday he joined a news conference to announce plans for the future of the privately funded Sept. 11 Tribute Center. It’s currently housed on the site of a former deli that was destroyed just feet from one of the collapsed towers and next to a firehouse that lost five men. The center has drawn as many as half a million visitors a year.

By spring it plans to reopen a few blocks away in a 40,000-square-foot space.

Years before the National September 11 Memorial & Museum opened, when visitors saw nothing but the wreckage, artifacts from the attack and recorded memories were kept by the center.

About 800 volunteer guides now take visitors on walking tours of the 9/11 site.