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Blasting Off to the Kennedy Space Center

By Brad Herzog

It seemed like a perfect concurrence of time and place, the kind of thing that tends to be quite common on an RV journey. After all, a house on wheels allows you to control where you're going and when you'll get there. This time, our drive up Florida's Atlantic Coast happened to coincide with the date of a scheduled launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery, which was something I had always wanted to see but never thought I could. So we tweaked our itinerary, snagged some launch tickets and headed for the Kennedy Space Center.

The date was July 1, which also happened to mark the anniversary of the establishment of NASA's Launch Operations Center in 1962. When we arrived at the Center, which is just 45 minutes east of Orlando, we were directed to special RV parking in a spacious lot and made our way toward the Visitor Complex just a few hundred yards away. The launch was scheduled for later in the day, so my wife and I and our two young sons had several hours to do what astronauts do best – explore.

Our sons gaped and gasped as we strolled through a garden, only it was a Rocket Garden, featuring wonders from all eras of space exploration – from Redstone and Atlas rockets to Gemini and Apollo capsules. They oohed and aahed at a 3-D movie about reaching the moon, a Tom Hanks-narrated IMAX film that seemed to transport us to the Sea of Tranquility. They laughed and learned during an Epcot-like tour detailing the history and future of robotic exploration. And they imagined themselves blasting off into space while climbing aboard a kid-sized space shuttle in the Children's Play Dome.

Finally, it was time to see the real thing. Along with hundreds of other visitors equally infused with the spirit of the occasion, we found a spot to set up a blanket at an open field alongside the Space Center. A large screen would show us liftoff, and then we would have a direct view of the shuttle after it cleared the tree line seconds later.

While we were sitting there, we began to chat with some folks from Arizona who were camped out next to us. They, too, were a family of four – only with two young daughters. And they, too, were exploring America by RV. It was another coincidence, although a not entirely unexpected one. Shouldn't it make sense that the sort of people who thrill at the wonders of space travel have found a way to travel in a spacious and comfortable capsule of their own?

As we swapped stories of where we had been and where we were going, we discovered, to our chagrin, that the Space Shuttle Discovery wasn't going anywhere. The only thing predictable about summer weather in Florida is its unpredictability, and heavy cloud cover would stop the countdown about nine minutes before liftoff. The launch would be delayed a few days, and we would wind up watching it on TV while dining at a restaurant in Savannah, Georgia. But there were no regrets. Simply being at the Space Center, surrounded by people who were still awed by the spirit of space exploration, had been an invigorating experience.

So we were smiling when we finally escaped the summer heat for the air-conditioned comfort of our RV. Once there, we continued to marvel at the way advances in technology have allowed humans to chase dreams and find adventure in worlds beyond their own.

I'm talking about the RV, of course. But rockets are pretty cool, too.

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