Day 2: NASA
Sunlight broke through the blinds as the sounds of cars passed by, Tuesday has arrived. My room got up late and we were some of the last ones to arrive for breakfast. However, we could barely eat because we were so excited to visit the NASA Space Center. Anticipation ruled the atmosphere on the bus as we crept closer to the space center. Driving in the parking lot, a huge modern building came into view. A park was on the left side of the building and on the right monumental rockets towered over the buildings, touching the clouds. The inside was open and clear with a rocket capsule model in the middle of it. Signs hung overhead and named the different parts of the museum. My group decided to go into the Starship Gallery and learned about the early days of rockets and space exploration. We saw the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo capsules on display. Additionally, we saw the largest public display of moon rocks.
After that, we went upstairs to a game educational center. We stood on weights that calculated how much we would weigh on different planets and played with rocket launching simulations. We walked in different space capsules and watched a documentary about space. However, we had to leave the movie early because we were going to ride the Tram Tour. The train took us around the NASA campus and showed us different areas of the museum. We learned a lot of interesting facts about the space center grounds. For instance, white tailed deer and cows roam the empty fields. The center was crowded with different FIRST robotics teams and other travelers from all around the world. The train stopped us in front of experimental rockets that never took flight. We took pictures and went inside the building that hosted a leviathan rocket that was the size of a football field. Everybody pulled out their cameras to take pictures and videos of this human creation. Honestly, it's amazing to think that humans, people like you and me, could imagine and create such a marvelous and complex structure capable of flying into space.
Of course we took many pictures and learned interesting facts for our scavenger hunt. We took pictures inside the museum and in front of the rockets. We learned that the Houston NASA space center was also a wildlife preserve. Additionally, studying the signs with the Apollo rockets information, we observed that Apollo 23456 were not listed because they were unsuccessful. A couple of strange facts that we learned for that scavenger hunt was that Apollo 12 got struck by lightning as it was blasting off from Earth and NASA was first created to create programs in the ocean and not space.
Some other groups decided to visit the Houston Aquarium after lunch. “At the aquarium, I was able to walk around lively scenes with my amazing teammates and experience different sea creatures for the first time! Touching the stingrays, seeing the white bengal tigers, and riding rides with my friends brought me joy and helped create such great memories. This day was so much fun for us all and I just can’t wait for the other memories that this week will bring!” Enedalia Garcia-Romera, Junior at Dougherty Comprehensive High School.
For dinner, my group decided to eat at a Japanese restaurant called Gyu Kaku. It was delicious and we will probably go back again sometime this week. I can’t wait for tomorrow!
