USA/Florida: JFK Space Visitor Center – Atlantis & Rockets

 

For all the time I spent in Florida, I had never made it to the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. So it finally happened on 2k19! This massive NASA complex occupies the larger part of the Merritt Island in the middle of the Atlantic coast of Florida. The visitor complex gets nearly 2 mln visitors a year! The main complex features many attractions, but only two are truly interesting in my opinion – the Rocket Garden and the Shuttle Atlantis. The Rocket Garden is the first thing you see when you pass the entrance gate – towering high above you, are Juno I, Mercury-Redstone, Thor , Mercury-Atlas, Gemini-Titan II, Saturn IB and others that took both astronauts and satellites into space. And at the other end of the complex is the Shuttle Atlantis – first the massive booster rocket that took the shuttle into the orbit and then the actual spaceship inside the building. It’s truly amazing and spectacular and huge! Atlantis was the fourth of the six Shuttles built and it flew 33 missions, including the very last mission of the Shuttle program in 2011. Atlantis is viewable pretty much from every possible angle – top and bottom and all sides and underneath. And you can even go for a simulated launch.
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