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Top 5 space travel destinations to visit
Fire up the jet pack, suck in some thin air, get a taste of zero g – it’s time to take one small step for yourself, and a giant leap for humanity. Here are 5 destinations related to space travel, whether you'd rather observe from the ground or head up there yourself.
1. Palomar Observatory, USA
High on Palomar Mountain, at an elevation of 1800m to avoid light pollution, the Palomar Observatory in San Diego is simply spectacular – as large as Rome’s Pantheon. It’s almost as beautiful as the Pantheon, too, with a classic design dating from the 1930s. The Observatory houses the world’s once-largest telescope, the 5.1m Hale Telescope, operated chiefly by computers now rather than humans. These days the observatory is chiefly used to track near-earth asteroids and is open to the public daily.
2. Kennedy Space Center, USA
Located on the famous Cape Canaveral in Florida, this is the granddaddy of all space facilities, the launch pad for the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programmes, as well as the various space shuttles. Remember masses of spectators gleefully cheering on astronauts ascending to the heavens; the Challenger shuttle falling to the sky to the horror of those watching…that’s all Kennedy. You too can witness history: select a launch date and park beside the highway a few miles away for free views. Or pay to get inside the VIP visitor’s area on the cape for the ultimate view.
3. Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan
Fans of Borat may laugh, but Kazakhstan has at least one genuine tourist attraction: the Baikonur Cosmodrome, still under lease to the Russians. This is the world’s oldest facility for launching space vehicles (Gagarin blasted off here) and has been a backdrop in Star Trek and William Gibson stories, among others. Join a tour and geek out at the obligatory space museum, as well as seeing the facilities where rockets are prepared and the actual rockets themselves.
4. Arecibo Radio Telescope, Puerto Ricohe
The Arecibo Observatory houses the world’s largest radio telescope, a beautiful structure (a work of art to many) featuring a huge, spherical reflector dish, 300m in diameter, composed of 40,000 perforated aluminium panels embedded into the surrounding jungle. Suspended by cables almost 140m above is a 900-tonne platform housing an extremely complicated system of antennas and units for focusing radio waves received from deepest space. It’s all far too complex to do justice to in 100 words. The telescope features in the films GoldenEye and Contact. Thankfully, it is open to the public (or at least an observation platform is).
5. Very Large Array, USA
Like Arecibo, the VLA in New Mexico is also featured in Contact, as well as in 2010 (sequel to 2001) and Independence Day – all films about alien contact. The VLA consists of 27 radio antennas, each 25m wide, arranged in a Yshape, with one arm of the array extending 21km. Each antenna can be moved to various positions on locomotive tracks and the output of the entire array syncs together, effectively functioning as one super-antenna with an area of 36km.
