Houston Hunt Series III – NASA Space Center

If you do any search on Google about places to visit in Houston, NASA Space Centre tops the list every time. It’s a huge space center located towards the south of Houston. You can spend a one compete day there, going through the simulated space rides, space shows, actual behind the scenes shows of live satellites and their control rooms, a walk inside the actual space shuttle, models of space shuttles, looking at stones brought from moon, playing games that give a feel of being on the outer space.
There is a tram tour to the live Johnson’s space center, where they take you around the facility and show the actual equipment that is used for Astronauts training, showing the collaboration between various nations participating in the space missions. A tram takes you around the facility and you get to see the components of the space ship, the rocket launcher. Though there are tour guides to show things around to you, you hardly get anything out of them as they tell you everything with the blankest face possible and with such a heavy accent that you hardly understand anything. Towards the end of tram tour, there is a live rocket that you get to see, and you have to see it to believe how huge it is
A movie show depicts how the an astronaut’s life is, how they prepare for the space trips, the training facility in Canada that is used to give them under water training, their trips to lonely places with a small team in extreme weather conditions, their food habits, their fitness regime, the problems they face when they return from a space trip. The whole process of space walk is demonstrated along with the purpose of the space walk. It is amazing to see the real people talk about their space experiences. Researchers are working on robots who can do the space walk instead of humans, and they show the design of the robots hands, which is modeled on the human hand, primarily because all the other equipment has been modeled to be handled by the human hand, so rather than designing a robot and then re-modeling all the other equipment, they modeled the robot on human hand. This also gives the flexibility to handle the equipment by both humans and robots. This was the most informative section in the whole visit.
There are lots of places where you can get your pictures clicked as astronauts, in space suits, in various space shuttles. There are small games for kids to feel and learn about the outer space. I am sure it definitely would generate good interest amongst kids and would contribute in motivating or inspiring the future space walkers. There was another film showing the first landing on moon, the rover being driven on moon and the press coverage of the event then.
A good experience, a first of its kind for me…would definitely recommend it to anyone visiting Houston.