If you ever want to know what it feels like to launch into outer space, then you’ll have to take your aspiring astronaut to Kennedy Space Center (KSC), and ride the new Shuttle Launch Experience that will lean you back, blast you off and make you feel like you are traveling at 4g’s into the Milky Way. Since I tend to get freaked-out by something as tame as a tilt-a-whirl, I used my “get-out-of-the-activity-because-I-have-to-take-care-of-the-baby” card and Alex & skipped it altogether. But, the rest of the family said it was totally cool.
Alex’s dad is a genuine NASA rocket scientist, so a family trip to check out the rockets was almost inevitable. Almost forty years ago, Kennedy Space Center was the place where humans lifted off the Earth to travel to the Moon. And, today it is the place where astronauts launch aboard the Space Shuttle and travel to space.
In our visit there, we barely scratched the surface of everything there is to see and do. Alex cruised through the Rocket Garden in the stroller, got his photo snapped in front of the Vehicle Assembly Building where they put the shuttles together before placing them on crawlers that go at super-slow speeds to carry them to the launch pads, and ran laps below the Apollo / Saturn V Rocket, the most complex machine ever built. Where else on the planet can your toddler do that?
I can’t wait to go back when Alex is a little bit older. But, who knows, maybe someday he’ll actually fly into outer space!?
