Seven Ways to Explore Space Without Leaving Earth | Travel

On a warm June evening several years ago, after 17 days rowing whitewater through the Grand Canyon, I was too tired to drive back to my summer base near Moab. I was searching for a quick campsite and found one amid the strangest of worlds: Cinder Hills Off Highway Vehicle Area in northern Arizona.

Filled with cinder cones and craters, the area looked like it had been hit by both a volcanic eruption and a meteor strike. As it turns out, the Cinder Hills were bombarded in the 1960s—not by natural forces but by some adventurous specialists from the United States Geological Survey and NASA. They were recreating a portion of the moon’s Sea of Tranquility, the smooth terrain where Apollo 11 would land in 1969.

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by space exploration. I devoured issues of Air & Space magazine, space books and science fiction shows. Yet, like a lot of enthusiasts, I found the 1990s and 2000s to be hard times. The plodding pace of real-life human space exploration caused my enthusiasm to wane. I became a raft guide and travel writer focused on Earthly adventures. But from dark-sky campsites across the country, I kept looking up at night, wondering when that next step beyond low Earth orbit might happen.

Stumbling across the Cinder Hills astronaut training site just when new NASA missions and SpaceX rockets were starting to launch stoked my interest in rediscovering the space age. Already I’d stopped by many space-related sites over the years, but how many more were out there? After a multiyear mission with plenty of research and travel, I was pleasantly surprised, finding more than 100 spots across the U.S. These places, captured in my new book Space Age Adventures: Over 100 Terrestrial Sites and Out of this World Stories, include astronaut training sites, artifact-filled museums, mountaintop observatories, working spaceports and NASA centers.

We’ve finally arrived at the dawn of a second space race. Public-private partnerships will carry humans back to the moon, onward to Mars and hopefully beyond. If you count yourself a casual enthusiast, having your own space-related fun down here might be an exciting way to connect more deeply with the events unfolding up there. Here are seven adventures to get you started.

Have…