European Space Port, Guiana

French Guiana launches rockets into space for the European Space Agency and last Tuesday we got to see one go up.  Very cool. 

You can get a guided tour of the facility with planning but we took the quick option and visited the museum at the entrance to the complex. I thoroughly enjoyed the self guided tour but Layne  thought it was a bit stingy on the artifacts. 

It was a mixture of statistics and film, pictures diagrams and explanations and lots of hands on stuff for kids. I have some of the child in me and I built my own spaceport just to see if I could. 

Access to the Space port couldn’t be simpler with a road leading off National 1, no security gates or checkpoints. You simply drive into a large parking lot and take pictures. Lots of pictures because to be here means you are a nerd. 

There are lots of signposts in French Guiana. When our phones stopped working it was still easy to get around and find our way in a country with not many road choices and lots of signposts. 

Europe doesn’t need Russia, China or the US to get into space…

I believe there is a golf course in the leisure area.  

Once in the parking area you can just drive around, step out with your camera and take photos. 

GANNET2 has come a long way.  

They put a little statue under the rocket to show the human scale. I put it on the roof of my van. 

Rusty keeps us down to earth. He cares nought for space flight. 

But he enjoyed the grass so we went for a walk. 

A well traveled dog.  This journey wouldn’t be the same without him. 

Anyway we turned on the rooftop a/c and he slept while  we  spent  an  hour  touring around inside the facility. 

And there’s a film looping in a seating area showing the launch sequence and all the related stuff. 

The blue dome is a planetarium but we managed to miss the last show of the day.

Rocket payloads, below, satellites nested in the nose cones of the rockets. 

A staircase. I got a bit loopy with my camera enjoying myself like I was a child again with a chemistry kit. 

Freed slaves set themselves up on land between Cayenne and Kourou along the coast and in the midst of all this technology they showed photos of life on the land as it once was. 

Not space suits but clean suits used when assembling rocket components for launch. The rockets are shipped here from Europe on specially designed container ships while the fuel paste for the rockets is blended and baked here on site. 

Prior to the launch there was a huge police presence on the roads with gendarme checkpoints and Foreign Legion military vehicles posted around the facility. After the launch they all vanished and the facility became once again, for us at least, a highly anticipated tourist attraction. 

The space facility is impressive to me because  not only is it isolated and far from similar engineering facilities but also because it requires a high level of cooperation among scientists of different cultures and languages, not to mention varied funding  and yet it works. 

I had a great time wandering around the place  and then our phones died and we thought maybe cell signals were suddenly being deliberately interrupted. No it was just our Verizon service suffering a hiccough. Technology, what a pain. 

We spent the night sweating despite the sea breeze at Rocky Point in Kourou after we gave up our cramped hundred dollar a night room outside Cayenne. A stranger walked by, we don’t know anyone so they are all strangers here, and said come and look at this. He spoke fluent English and was completely mysterious  so I followed him obediently and this is what I saw, my attempt at a video. Our impromptu guide is the man in black standing alone and still on top of the rock as I start to pan my iPhone around the place.  

I’m pretty sure I failed completely to grasp the astonishing bird flight rn made because I’m rotten at video, a complicated medium I don’t like at all, but you can hear the breeze that failed to cool us down properly. Oh well.