The Astronaut Training Experience at Kennedy Space Center is the ultimate day out for the space fan in your life (or for you if you’ve always harboured dreams of going into space!). This separately ticketed part of the Kennedy Space Center experience is one of the newest additions to the complex and aims to prepare guests for a trip into space in the most authentic and realistic way possible.
Where better to start your training than at the Kennedy Space Center, where real space missions launch regularly to this day, sending men and supplies up to the International Space Center? You’ll begin your experience in Mars Base I, learning more about how space travel has impacted our life on earth as you tour model operational rooms and learn about the biology and technology experiments that are taking place on the International Space Center. There’s plenty of opportunity to get your hands dirty as you grow and harvest plants in the Botany Lab, collecting data to return to real NASA scientists. You can also engage your brain, creating circuits to programme robots cleaning debris from solar panels.
Next up you’ll move into the training room, where things get really serious! You’ll experience microgravity as you take a seat in a specially adapted chair that mimics the sensation of floating through space, tethered only by a rope to the ISC. As you’re floating, instructions are fed into your ear for what repairs need to be made from one of your colleagues on the tour experience, whose job it is to guide you as you complete your mission. Test how easily you can work under pressure as the clock ticks down!
Next up, you’re headed for a walk on Mars – yes, you heard that right! Now the person guiding you gets their chance in the driving seat as they put on a VR headset which mimics the sensations and environment of a walk on Mars. It’s your turn to guide them as they attempt to navigate their way round this hostile environment completing small tasks.
Finally, you’ll take on the Mars Rover – a compact pod-like vehicle which trains future astronauts for the sensations of landing and travelling on Mars. Get strapped in as you spin every which way in a bid to prepare you for the sensations of zero gravity when we finally reach the red planet.
You can watch a short video of when we tried out these experiences ourselves just here...
Enjoy all these attractions and more during the Astronaut Training Experience, a 5-hour experience which will equip you with the wits and knowledge to decide if a life of space travel is for you. Add this experience on as a second day, after a full day experience the Kennedy Space Visitor Complex.
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