Travel,  USA

A Visit to Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida

One hours’s drive from Orlando lies one of the biggest attractions of North America, the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral , it is the place from which NASA launches most of its rockets  and it is NASA’s Gateway to Space.
Recently I was in Orlando for a week and one of the first places I wanted to see was this . Yes, you read that right, not the DisneyWorld or Universal . KSC ( Kennedy Space Center ) has held  great fascination for me for many years , it is the place from where Pioneers like Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin , Kalpana Chawla , Sunita Williams and many others started their space conquests.

We took an Uber out of our hotel in Orlando and it took us close to an hour to get there. The drive to Cape Canaveral was very pleasant, not much traffic and it was  a gorgeous summer day with slightly overcast conditions.

As we reached our destination and just as we bought the tickets and entered the main complex, it started to rain heavily.
One Amazing thing which happened that 10 mins before it started to rain, the KSC people announced on their PA system that  “Please take cover, it will be raining in 10 mins ” and their prediction was bang on the money, down to the minute. Now I know they have to launch rockets based on the their weather forecasts but this was pretty impressive .
We were stranded at the gate for some time as the way to the other buildings was through an open area and we had not brought any umbrellas. Other people were also making a dash for it and we decided to follow them…

 

The whole place was really looking majestic in the rains and it was a sight to behold for sure.

The rain didn’t last too long and we made our way towards the bus tours center which takes the visitors to various points around the campus.

The KSC is organized into Mission Zones where attractions and tours are grouped in chronological order.

The Kennedy Space Center Bus Tour is one of the main attractions and the bus takes you around to many of the working facilities of the center. The only caveat is that you cannot get off the bus anywhere and the bus wont stop at any of the attractions either, you have to see and take pictures from the moving bus although the speed of the bus is very slow and it almost comes to a crawl in some places of interest. I highly recommend that this is the first thing you do at the KSC. The Normal tour lasts about 2 hours and you get to see many fascinating sights .

You can see in the 2 videos below  part of the Apollo 8 Launch center recreation which bought goose pimples to my skin and also the crawler which carries the rocket in the crawlerway..

The pictures below show some of the sights we visited that day and I must repeat that  the visit to Cape Canaveral was the highlight of my week long stay in Orlando during which I also had the chance to visit Disney World, Epcot, Universal Studios , Helicopter ride over Orlando , the swamps of Florida and many other attractions.

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