Texas and Florida are home to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) main space centers. In Houston, Texas, the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center is a place where visitors can see the history of space exploration through exhibits and space missions. The center features such attractions as an interactive exhibit of what it is like to live in space, a performance of a trip to space, an exhibit on NASA’s role in the International Space Station, a replica of the Space Shuttle, and artifacts such as the lunar rover, the Apollo 17 Command Module, and the Saturn V rocket. Visitors of all ages can look into the history of space exploration and see where future exploration is headed.
Mission control is also located in Houston. This is the place that handled all U.S. space flights after the spacecraft had been launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, where launch control is located. However, Los Estados Unidos no longer sends its own manned spacecraft into space.
When I first came to Los Estados Unidos, one of the first places I visited was Cape Canaveral in Florida. Cape Canaveral, or the Space Coast, is on the eastern coast of Florida at the John F. Kennedy Space Center, which has been the launch site for every American spacecraft since 1968.
The Kennedy Space Center was created for the Apollo missions to the moon; President Kennedy wanted to put the first man on the moon. And in July 1969, the Apollo 11 landed on the moon in a historic spacewalk by American astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins. Since that historic day, there have been many successful space missions, both manned and unmanned.
The Kennedy Space Center itself has so many attractions that it was hard to see everything in one day! Exhibits such as the Space Shuttle Atlantis, the Apollo/Saturn V center, and Astronaut Training Experience give visitors an idea of how life is in space and what an actual space flight is like. I loved walking through the Rocket Garden at the Kennedy Space Center, where I saw the actual Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo rockets. I also thought that the Robot Scouts exhibit was very interesting, as it shows how unmanned spacecraft work.
Seeing these missions, launches, and spacecraft in person is completely different than seeing them in a photo or on TV, and it’s definitely worth the visit
