We’re living in a galactic golden era. While my space enthusiast dad — who was 21 at the time of the Apollo 11 moon landing — had to wait years between televised missions, his similarly star-obsessed granddaughter can witness two to three rocket launches per week on her smartphone. Whatever you think of Elon Musk, the founder of Space X, or Jeff Bezos, the owner of the aerospace company Blue Origin, these are exciting times for space exploration.
My 12-year-old is so space-obsessed it became the theme of our most recent family holiday — a 4,500-mile transatlantic adventure to Florida. It’s no wonder she and so many of Gen Alpha are agog. In the month leading up to our trip, two astronauts made global headlines when they returned to Earth having lived in the International Space Station for nine months. Then Katy Perry — along with an all-female crew, including Bezos’s wife Lauren Sánchez — made history (and punchlines) flying to the edge of space in the Blue Origin New Shepard rocket.
Our holiday had to start in Kennedy Space Center, Nasa’s primary spaceport, in Cape Canaveral outside Orlando (entry from £56pp, £48 per child; kennedyspacecenter.com). Its Visitor Complex, once an educational centre, has such brilliant new rides and attractions it could now classify as a theme park. On our packed return flight I counted as many Nasa T-shirts as Mickey Mouse baseball caps.
Its two newest experiences are Gateway: Deep Space Launch Complex and Hyperdeck VR. In the former you access the “ride” via an extraordinary collection of space stuff — modern-day astronaut suits, a replica of the Blue Origin New Shepard capsule (in which Perry flew) and a mock-up of a “habitat” orbiting the moon — so that children learn as they go. The ride — Spaceport KSC — then takes you on one of four immersive journeys through the solar system (we chose Mars). It’s no white-knuckle rollercoaster but it’s very cool that the attractions are based in reality — thus we encountered a Mars dust storm — and the queues are a fraction of those in Florida’s big-thrill parks.
From left: Lauren Sánchez, Katy Perry and the all-female crew who flew to the edge of space in the Blue Origin New Shepard rocket
THE MEGA AGENCY
For Hyperdeck, meanwhile, we wore VR headsets to become astronauts collecting lunar materials on the moon’s surface. And new for this summer (it opened on July 8), the Gantry at LC-39 enables visitors to stand beneath a rocket booster during a simulated launch, including countdown, thunderous noise and air blasts. It’s included on what turned out to be my favourite bit: the Kennedy Space Center bus tours. The Behind the Gates tours travel through restricted areas, right alongside that vast Vehicle Assembly Building, made famous in many movies (it’s so massive that the blue portion of the painted American flag is as big as a basketball court). As we drove along, we saw a Space X rocket being transported to its launchpad just metres away. Such moments beat even the most high-tech attractions.
We stayed at the Courtyard by Marriott Titusville Kennedy Space Center. It’s the nearest hotel to Kennedy Space Center, with a Space Bar rooftop restaurant for front-row launch viewings — perfect if it’s 4am and you’re in your PJs. For kids there’s galactic wallpaper, a space light in every room that projects constellations onto the ceiling, as well as a room service robot. Of course, we ordered “forgotten” toothpaste to our room just for fun, then watched in awe as the robot set off again.
Next stop on our space tour was Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, the latest land to open at Walt Disney World Orlando. If your children are into space exploration then I’ll bet you a billion galactic credits they’re into Star Wars, so you need to include it in the mix. The rides are out of this world, of course, but it’s the attention to detail that impressed me. My daughter was able to build her own working robot at the Droid Depot, while on the Star Wars Datapad app she could map her way around the park and solve complex problems.
Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida has recently added two new experiences to their Visitor Complex
ALAMY
Beyond Galaxy’s Edge — which is just one land in one of four Disney parks (you’ll need a week at least) — we rode the new space-themed Tron and Guardians of the Galaxy rollercoasters. There’s also the attraction Mission: Space, which was opened by genuine Nasa astronauts, who deemed it the “closest thing civilians will feel to space travel”. We heard that so many early riders felt sick afterwards, Disney introduced a less intense Green mission in addition to the original Orange version. So, it’s not only Kennedy Space Center that offers an authentic experience.
Spaced out, I insisted the last few days of our family trip be spent on the coast. We chose laid-back New Smyrna Beach, where we knew we could spot dolphins — another Florida must-see for my daughter, who had watched them swimming around the splashed-down space capsule containing those two delayed ISS astronauts. We swam, we surfed, we cycled along boardwalks through the sand dunes and generally stuck to earthly pleasures.
But at 10.24pm on the last night our phones buzzed in unison with a space launch alert. We were to have a final out-of-this-world moment before leaving the US. Even 40 miles away on New Smyrna Beach, we could clearly see the orange blasters soar into the night sky from Kennedy Space Center. We watched in astounded silence from the sand.
Katie Bowman was a guest of Tui Airways, which has Gatwick-Orlando returns from £296 (tui.co.uk); Visit Orlando (visitorlando.com); Four Seasons Orlando, which has room-only doubles from £990 (fourseasons.com); Marriott Titusville Kennedy Space Center, which has room-only doubles from £127 (marriott.com); Casago New Smyrna Beach, which has seven nights’ self-catering for four from £1,490 (casagonsb.com); Kennedy Space Center, which has adult entry from £56, children £48 (kennedyspacecenter.com); and Walt Disney World, which has a 14-day entry ticket from £459pp (disneyholidays.co.uk)