Tuesday at the Kennedy Space Center

In space! Where's my helmet??

Tuesday was a blast. Grandpa and I got to see the [real] space shuttle Atlantis. There were many floors to the Atlantis exhibit, yet we climbed them all. On the second floor, there was an arrow on the wall that said, "To re-entry burn. we followed the arrows to a large slide heading down to the first floor. I talked my grandfather into going on it with me, and he said yes. After the slide, we went to the shuttle launch experience. We went into a large, metal tube, put a harness on, and then the whole thing got tilted 90 degrees. The tube didn't replicate the G force of liftoff, but you could definitely feel force on your face. Just to be clear, I was NOT screeching, "WHEN I GET BACK ON THE GROUND, I'M SUING EVERYONE AT LAUNCH CONTROL!!!!!" I had a hard time readjusting to the angle of gravity after that. After that, we went to the Astronaut Training Experience[ATX] and got to put on a VR headset and hand controllers, and it looked liked you were on Mars, with a scanner in your left hand, and in front of you, was the same rover we saw yesterday[AKA: batmobile].To be continued.

All the buttons and switches to push - which ones??

Rowan's report on his experiences continue and he'll be adding more tomorrow. It was a full two days at the Space Center. In one area, they were taking photos against a green screen which we later found out inserted outer space as a backdrop. The highlight of today was a virtual reality experience on Mars that all the astronauts had to go through. You put on the goggles and everywhere you turned, you saw a Mars landscape. You had to pick up rock samples and put them in a box. In the next stage, Rowan and I were secured inside a Mars Rover that I described yesterday - 360 flips were not fun but I suppose were realistic for the driving I was doing.

Gradually we are waking Fleetwing up from her winter slumber. We took on water, had the bottom scrubbed, replaced the zinc, with more to do before we leave on Sunday for Vero Beach.