As the presentation wrapped up, the weather was not looking good at all for launch the next day. I’ve been through two hurricanes, and those were the only times I can remember more intense rain. Lightning struck the Shuttle launchpad during this storm, and NASA TV had to shut down its coverage of the Tweetup.

A bit after noon, the weather cleared up a bit, and we broke for lunch. On our way back from the KSC Cafeteria, we encountered NASA’s “Tertiary Security System” in one of the drainage ditches near the Vehicle Assembly Building parking lot.

Next up, we boarded a group of our buses to begin our behind-the-scenes tour of Kennedy Space Center. We had heard that previous Tweetup had been able to see the Rotating Service Structure being rolled back to unveil the Shuttle before launch. And sure enough, our first stop was the fence just outside of the Shuttle launch pad perimeter! We were mere hundreds of feet from Atlantis. The space geek excitement was palpable.

However, what we could see was the launch pad, the external tank and solid rocket boosters, and the RSS wrapped securely around Atlantis.

The original scheduled time for the RSS retraction was 2 pm, and we’d arrived around 2:40. The weather and lightning strike had delayed the RSS retraction, and we were worried we were going to miss the chance to see the Space Shuttle up close. Would it retract before we had to roll at 3:15? After some excruciatingly subtle movements, the RSS started moving quickly, swinging around to unveil the Space Shuttle Atlantis!

It’s awesome that the retired shuttles will be on display in museums, but it’s a shame nobody will ever see the full “stack” with the tank and SRBs, because I gotta tell you, it’s impressive. At 184 feet tall, the Shuttle stack is more than 30 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty. Seeing it in person, it seemed inconceivable that that huge assembly was about to go straight up at thousands of miles an hour.

Everyone was passing around cameras shooting Facebook profile pictures with the Space Shuttle in the background—even though most of us were quite a sight with the 90+ degree weather and 90%+ humidity. After a group shot, we boarded the buses and hit the road.

STS-135 Tweetup participants are seen outside launch pad 39a and space shuttle Atlantis following the Rotating Service Structure rollback, Thursday, July 7, 2011, at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.About 150 NASA Twitter followers attended the event. The STS-135 mission will be NASA’s last space shuttle launch. Photo Credit: (NASA/Paul E. Alers)

As we drove away from the pad, we stopped briefly to get a great look at the shuttle from another vantage point.

The next stop was the Saturn V Center, where Americans can pay tribute to how our government saves money: Spend hundreds of millions of dollars building moon rockets, and then save tens of millions by not actually launching them! Actually, though hearing Apollo 18-20 were cancelled when I was in second grade may have been the first time I ever got annoyed with our government, I have to admit I’m glad to have gotten the chance to see a Saturn V in person. At double the height of the Space Shuttle stack, it’s an amazing feat of engineering. If you’re ever at Kennedy Space Center, don’t just go to the Visitor’s Center, be sure to take the tour to see this amazing rocket. You’ll also get the chance to touch a moon rock, view a space suit that walked on the moon, and much more.

Our final stop of the day was another special one: the Vehicle Assembly Building, the amazing structure where the Saturn V rockets were assembled, and where the Space Shuttle was stacked onto its boosters. It used to be the world’s largest building by volume (now eclipsed by the Boeing factory in my current home state), but it’s still the largest “one-story” building in the world, and is a breathtaking structure. Click here for a 360-degree panorama I shot with my iPhone.

As the VAB tour concluded, with the weather still gloomy and a chance that the weather would be so bad that NASA would decide that not not to even fuel the shuttle, we asked our NASA guide what the plan would be for the Tweetup tomorrow if the launch was scrubbed. “If there are any schedule changes,” he said, “we’ll let you know via the @NASATweetup Twitter feed and via e-mail.” Despite the 30-percent chance of favorable launch weather, they weren’t going to use the “s” word.