Raccoons and Rockets at Kennedy Space Centre

I was looking forward to seeing the Kennedy Space Centre as this isn’t a mere theme park, but an actual proper space centre! We drove there from Orlando in the morning which is certainly do-able, although we were running late and had also forgotten that the clocks had gone forward and we’d lost another hour – doh! So we were fashionably late as per usual. Cue more drama on the gate as our credit card company cut us off… again! Apparently the $15 we spent on lunch in Walmart tipped them over the edge and triggered a security alert. Chicken Caesar salads can be dangerous you know!

But we finally got into the Space Centre and really enjoyed it. We started off by taking the bus tour to see the extremities of the site – including a view of the launchpad (where I saw a raccoon in the bushes!) and the tall building where the rockets are assembled.

We ended up at a large warehouse containing real equipment used by the astronauts – such as space suits, the bus used to take the astronauts to the launchpad, and an enormous rocket!

It was all really interesting but my boyfriend was doing his best to read every word on every sign. This is not a good idea. As I soon realised and left him to it and caught the bus back on my own. My boyfriend realised this too, a little too late – a few hours later I was looking round an exhibition when I happened to look out of the window and saw my boyfriend running past the window in the manner of Benny Hill, which made me laugh! The muppet had spent so much time on the first parts of the tour and had suddenly realised that he was out of time! So get there early if you’re the type of person who likes to read every word!

The main site contains lots of stuff including two IMAX movies, a “rocket garden”, an exhibition showing more information about rocket launches, a rocket simulator (which I wimped out of, having felt very ill on the Mission Space ride at Disney), and a real space craft which you could go inside. There was too much stuff to see in a half-day so if you’re going for a day, I’d get up early rather than being lazy like us. We didn’t have time to visit the Astronaut’s Hall of Fame at all, which was situated down the road, although tickets can be used the following day for the Hall of Fame, in which case you could always pop back in the morning.

Overall I enjoyed our visit to the Kennedy Space Centre. I enjoyed the fact that it was a real space station, and not just a theme park for tourists. We also saw some wildlife on our tours around the site – the raccoon, an eagle’s nest, and an alligator chilling in a river beside the road. The only thing that would have improved our visit was to see an actual launch! 😉