Not to be left out, the public will have its day at World Space Congress 2002. On the final day of World Space Congress 2002, Saturday, Oct. 19, NASA’s Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (JSC) will host a free event, “Discover NASA Day: Astronauts, International Space Station and Beyond…,” opening the doors of the World Space Congress to the public at downtown Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center. NASA astronauts will be on hand for presentations and autographs, while the Discovery Channel’s newly released Return to Hubble will be showing in the General Assembly Theatre.

“Discover NASA Day: Astronauts, International Space Station and Beyond&” will feature interactive demonstrations by astronauts, some of whom have lived in space for nearly six months. The public will have the chance to speak with these explorers as well as the scientists and engineers who work for the U.S. space program. There will also be a special opportunity to see the Discovery Channel’s newly released Return to Hubble, which chronicles the 2002 space shuttle mission that saw seven astronauts rendezvous with, capture, repair and release the Hubble Space Telescope.

For kids and “kids at heart,” there will be interactive, educational activity stations throughout the exhibit. Special presentations such as “It’s Hard to Dance in a Spacesuit” and “Where Next?” will give the public an inside peak into what NASA does to protect space voyagers and where they are headed in the coming years.

The event is an excellent opportunity for the public to meet the people who work for the U.S. space program and ask the questions only astronauts can answer: “What’s it like to float all day at work?” “How do you eat in space?” “What do you do for fun up there?”.

More information about the human spaceflight program is available at http://spaceflight.nasa.gov.

More information on World Space Congress, including JSC’s involvement, is available at http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/wsc.