Coming with her husband and two children from the north of England to spend a space vacation in Florida, she details her plan of attack for D-Day: “take the road very early to find a place” on the beach from Cocoa Beach, not far from the Kennedy Space Center.
NASA’s newest mega-rocket, the world’s most powerful, is to be launched from there for the first time on Monday.
“I know it will take place in the distance, but I think it will still be quite incredible,” she told AFP, just before going to visit a park dedicated to the conquest of space, to wait.
Between 100,000 and 200,000 visitors are expected for the launch of this mission called Artemis 1, which will propel a vacuum capsule to the Moon in order to test it for future astronauts. By comparison, SpaceX’s first manned launch in 2020 attracted 220,000 people.
“The historic nature” of Monday’s flight, the first of the US program to return to the Moon, “certainly raised the interest of the public”, Meagan Happel, from the tourist office on the coast, told AFP. Florida space.
Traffic jams are expected on the road from 4:00 a.m., for a launch scheduled for 8:33 a.m. If the takeoff is postponed, for example because of the weather, more people could flock to the next date, in the middle of the weekend.
Hotels on the coast have been full for several weeks, and parking spaces near the best viewpoints are limited.
– Space cruise –
Lucky, Sabrina Morley was able to rent an apartment not far from the beach, and will go up with her two children and a few dozen other people on a boat chartered for the occasion by a company, “Star fleet tours”.
For 95 dollars per ticket, “we will go to the ocean as close as possible to the launch area, and we will see the takeoff from the boat”, she marvels in advance.
“I’ve never been so close to takeoff,” said the 43-year-old, who grew up in Orlando, less than an hour away. As a child, she could see the space shuttles take off from her garden, like “a big orange ball” rising in the sky, and even hear the explosion when they broke the sound barrier.
She likes that NASA’s Artemis program aims to land a woman on the moon for the first time (in 2025 at the earliest).
“Representation matters,” she says, looking at her two-year-old daughter, who is already wearing a imitation astronaut helmet on her head.
– Good for trade –
For the region, the return of prestigious launches is a godsend. A family of three will spend an average of $1,300 over 4 or 5 days, according to the tourist office.
On the main road of Merritt Island, the peninsula where the Kennedy Space Center is located, Brenda Mulberry’s store, dedicated to space, is full of tourists. As soon as they enter, they come across Artemis T-shirts, printed on site (1,000 copies just this Saturday).
In recent days “we feel a real flow of people”, told AFP the boss, who founded “Space Shirts” in 1984.
“They can’t wait to see NASA take off, because the private space sector isn’t that motivating for people,” she said. This rocket there, named SLS and of which she placed a large model in front of her store, “belongs to the people, it is their rocket. Not that of SpaceX.”
Nostalgia for the Apollo program is also on everyone’s mind. The last time a habitable capsule went to the Moon was in 1972.
“My family had to go to the neighbors to watch” the Apollo missions, because they did not have television, says Joanne Bostandji, who was not yet born.
Monday’s take-off will therefore be very special: “there, with luck we will see it for real.”
