The American States According to Joanne Bostandji, witnessing a rocket launch toward the Moon is “a once-in-a-lifetime thing to experience.” The 45-year-old woman and her family have flown all the way to Florida from northern England for a vacation themed around space, and they’re ready to make sure they don’t miss a second of the excitement as NASA’s newest and most potent rocket is due to launch for the first time on Monday.
The idea is to arrive at Cocoa Beach close to the Kennedy Space Center “quite early in the morning,” she said.
As the family waited to enter a park devoted to space exploration, Bostandji told AFP, “I know it will be from a vast distance, but I still think it’s going to be a sight to behold.” An estimated 100,000 to 200,000 spectators are anticipated at the launch of the Artemis 1 mission, which will send an empty spacecraft to the Moon as a test for upcoming crewed flights.
Meagan Happel of Florida’s Space Coast Office of Tourism told AFP that the “historic significance” of Monday’s trip, the first of several as the United States returns to the Moon, “definitely has heightened public interest.” Traffic congestion is anticipated to begin at 4 AM, and the launch is scheduled for 8:33 AM (1233 GMT). If the launch is postponed due to bad weather, more people might attend the make-up date, which falls on a weekend.
Sabrina Morley is bringing her two children and a few dozen other people aboard a boat that Star Fleet Tours has hired especially for the event. Sabrina Morley was able to find an apartment to rent close to the beach.
“We’ll go out into the ocean as close as they can get to the launch and we’ll watch the launch from the boat,” she added of the $95 per ticket experience.
The 43-year-old, who was born and raised less than an hour away in Orlando, declared, “I’ve never been this close to a launch before.” She remembers watching space shuttles launch as a young girl; they seemed to her as “an orange ball of smoke” ascending into the sky. She recalled, “We would hear the loud booms.”
Morley appreciates that NASA’s Artemis program will, at the earliest, send a crew to the Moon in 2025, with the goal of putting a woman there for the first time.
She looked at her two-year-old daughter, who is already donning a replica astronaut helmet on her head, and remarked, “Representation is important. The region will benefit economically from the reintroduction of prominent space launches. According to the tourism office, a family of three will spend $1,300 on average over the course of four or five days. Tourists are swarming Brenda Mulberry’s space memorabilia shop on the main route to Merritt Island, the peninsula home to the Kennedy Space Center.
Visitors are greeted with Artemis T-shirts for sale as soon as they walk in; 1,000 copies were printed just on Saturday. Mulberry, who invented “Space Shirts” in 1984, told AFP that the past four days had witnessed a surge in clients. They are merely delighted to witness a NASA launch, in her opinion, because the private space industry does not inspire the public as much.
This SLS rocket, of which there is a sizable model outside her store, “belongs to the people,” Mulberry claimed. Their rocket, they say. She continued, “It’s not a SpaceX rocket. There is a sense of longing for the Apollo space program because it has been 50 years since the last crewed mission to the Moon, which took place in 1972. The yet-to-be-born Bostandji added, “My family, they had to go to the neighbor’s house to watch (the Apollo missions) because they didn’t have a television.”
