Uñt’ayata: 25.07.2018
Last night we stayed at the Best Western Cocoa Beach. The hotel is located right on the beach, so Nadi and I took the opportunity this morning for a leisurely walk on the beach. Afterwards, we stopped briefly at Dunkin' Donuts to temporarily quiet the kids. While they chewed in the backseat, I drove our vehicle towards the Kennedy Space Center.
For the next 6 hours, there was plenty of interesting information about NASA's Apollo and Space Shuttle programs. We took a tour of the vast grounds and saw the launch pads for rockets and space shuttles, as well as many other details in the non-public part of the base. We also saw plenty of wildlife on the grounds, from ospreys and turtles to alligators and, this time for sure, a Florida panther.
But of course, the focus was on the stories of NASA's many space missions and the planned Mars expedition for the 2030s. The astronauts who will undertake this job must prepare for a three-year trip, with the round trips alone lasting a whopping six months each. However, the highlights of the tours were the Saturn V rocket of the Apollo missions and the Space Shuttle Atlantis, which came into the exhibit in 2011 after 26 years of service. Space flights, moon landings, and the planned Mars expedition are just stories from the news for most of us, so being so close was very interesting and, above all, exciting. We give it the predicate: Highly recommended!
To conclude the day in Cape Canaveral, we boarded a space shuttle launch simulator ... shaken up, we then embarked on the last long journey of our trip - back to Miami.