William P. Hobby Airport

The Lone Star Flight Museum sits at the western edge of Ellington Field, on the site of one of America's last surviving WWI air training bases. The collection began in 1985 as a private holding of restored warbirds by Houston funeral magnate Robert Waltrip; it opened to the public at Galveston's Scholes Field in 1990. In September 2017 the museum moved into a new $38 million, 130,000 sq ft facility next to Ellington — closer to its airshow audiences and on an active military/commercial/NASA flightline. The flying collection includes a B-17 Flying Fortress, B-25 Mitchell, DC-3, P-47 Thunderbolt, F4U Corsair, SBD Dauntless, TBM Avenger, T-6 Texan, and Stearman trainer — all still airworthy. Rides are sold in the B-17, B-25, and T-6. The Texas Aviation Hall of Fame, established by the Texas Legislature in 1995, lives in the building. Its 100+ inductees include Bessie Coleman, Wiley Post, Howard Hughes, Eisenhower, both Bush presidents, the Tuskegee Airmen, the WASPs, the Doolittle Raiders, and astronauts Eileen Collins, Joe Engle, and Gene Cernan.

NASA Johnson Space Center occupies 1,620 acres on Clear Lake, ~25 miles SE of downtown Houston. It opened in 1961 as the Manned Spacecraft Center and was renamed for Lyndon Johnson in 1973. Mission Control here has run every American crewed spaceflight since Gemini 4 in June 1965 — Apollo, Skylab, the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station, and now Artemis. The radio callsign is just "Houston." The first words spoken from the surface of the Moon were "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." The 1969-era Apollo Mission Operations Control Room is a National Historic Landmark, restored to its July 1969 condition for the Apollo 11 50th anniversary — even the wallpaper was reprinted from the manufacturer's saved rollers. Outside, Rocket Park displays the only horizontally-mounted Saturn V in the country, a 363-foot vehicle built for an Apollo mission cancelled before it could fly.

The San Jacinto Monument is the tallest stone column memorial in the world at 567 feet — 15 feet taller than the Washington Monument. It marks the site where Sam Houston's Texian Army defeated Santa Anna on April 21, 1836, winning Texas independence from Mexico in a battle lasting just 18 minutes. The Battleship Texas (BB-35), the last surviving dreadnought battleship, is moored nearby. From the air, the monument's distinctive star-topped column is visible from miles across the flat Houston Ship Channel industrial landscape — a monument to revolution surrounded by refineries.

Brazos Bend is a 4,897-acre park on a slow bend of the Brazos River about 45 minutes southwest of Houston, near KSGR; from the air it's a big block of cypress bayou and bottomland in otherwise developed country. Somewhere between 250 and 350 adult alligators live in its waterways, which is why the rule is thirty feet of distance and no swimming. The odd tenant is the George Observatory, a Houston Museum of Natural Science outpost on a rise in the park, with three domed telescopes including a 36-inch that's open to the public on Saturday nights. It works because the park keeps the sky dark this close to a major city.