I've been NASA'd

Last week I went to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, which makes me more of an astronaut than you'll ever be.  I had been summoned by NASA to undertake some astronaut training and also to channel my extraordinary engineering abilities.  I have a keyring that says rocket scientist to prove it.  They don't just sell those things at the merchandise shop, you know.

As I walked through the door at Kennedy I was bombarded by a real-life fake astronaut at the entry to the facility.  He so desperately wanted to have his photo taken with me, so I obliged.  He was a great big ball of fun but his space backpack looked like a 24 pack of toilet rolls covered in white paint. Hmm.

The first thing budding astronauts do on arrival at Kennedy is jump on the tour bus.  But of course.  We headed on over to the LC-39 Observation Gantry, which is just a fancy name for a rather high tower made of steel, ladders, elevators and ice cream stands that one climbs to take a gander at the launch pad in the distance.  The launch pad area is fairly awesome, even though it is a good few clicks away.

Just near the gantry is the Crawler Transporter, which is just a fancy name for the sandy, gritty road that is used to roll space shuttles along on the initial stage of their journey to the moon.  Or on their journey to test piloting if their flight commander only got 99% in their astronaut entrance exam.  The concrete underneath this road is apparently 16 inches thick, which is helpful as the contraptions that carry the space-going machines weigh, like, a shitload.

We also saw the Vehicle Assembly Building where they put all the nuts and bolts together in a hideously complicated fashion.  This building is massive, but fairly non-descript, if you discount the Starship Enterprise-looking thing hanging around inside it. 

Just kidding, you don't get to see Space Shuttle Atlantis at all.  They just tell you it's in there and you are supposed to act all excited as if you can see it.  The final mission of Atlantis was July 2011, the last flight of the now defunct NASA space program. Good one, Obama; you tool.

To be honest, the whole Space Centre is filled with the same boring, beige concrete structures that house Bureaus of Statistics' in government cities, and the only thing that makes them vaguely interesting is the NASA logo.  Although many of them have cool names, like Integrated Booster Retrieval Area.  I made that one up, and I don't even know if that's a thing, but it sounds legit and spacey.

I then popped on over to the Apollo/Saturn V Center, where you can stand underneath the rather humongous Saturn V rocket that hangs off the ceiling.  It was the backup for the famous moon mission.  I guess NASA did a how-to-hang-a-rocket-ship-on-your-ceiling Saturday morning workshop. 

I can't get bluetac to hold my Christmas tinsel on the walls in my workplace so kudos to them.   Maybe I shouldn't have dropped out of Advanced Aerodynamics at university.  At this point of the day I was fairly confident that my trip to the moon was just around the corner.

Me walking in Neil Armstrong's moonboots.

I also touched some black lunar rock, which raised my suspicions, what with the moon being white and all.  Maybe NASA were pushing the affirmative action thing.  This is America after all.  Or is the moon black?  Or grey? I don't know. Who cares.  I'm sure I'll know it when I see it when they send me up.  The Americans have been there many times, so I'm sure they've put up welcome to the moon signage and a Starbucks.

I was super busy for the rest of the day, such is the life of a rocket scientist slash astronaut.  I bought freeze-dried icecream balls, which were completely disgusting.  IMAX is there too and provided two amazing presentations, with actual footage of the Hubble telescope and the international space station in 3D.  Incredible.

As well as being an active space facility, Kennedy is also a theme park so there is the obligatory theme park ride.  Of course.  The Shuttle Launch Experience tips you upside down and tries to create zero gravity and that's a bit of fun.  I didn't get to go to the moon after all.  Maybe next time.  By then perhaps the next U.S. President may have reactivated the NASA space program.