A small crowd gathers to watch a rocket launch at an amateur rocketry gathering in Palm Bay, Florida.
Photograph by Robert Ormerod, National GeographicChloe Klare, 20, sits in her dorm room at Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Florida. Klare is an astrophysics major, and her research focuses on cloud formations on Jupiter. "I’m not going to conform to traditional gender roles," she says. "I’m not afraid to go into a male-dominated field. There’s a lot of guys in all my classes, and I don’t let it bother me. That’s fine. Women can do this too."
Photograph by Robert OrmerodAt the Atlantis exhibit inside the Visitor Complex at Kennedy Space Centre in Cape Canaveral, people gather to watch a film about the shuttle. Atlantis made its first voyage to space in 1985 and continued to run trips off-world over the next 30 years. Its final mission—to the International Space Station in 2011—marked the end of NASA's space shuttle program.
Photograph by Robert Ormerod, National GeographicBaltimore native Carlos McCauley moved to the Florida Space Coast 23 years ago. A space enthusiast since he was a child, McCauley says once upon a time he aspired to travel to the cosmos: "I wanted to be an astronaut, like everyone in the '50s and '60s," he says, "but I was terrible at math."
Photograph by Robert Ormerod, National GeographicRamond Hamed, 68, sits inside the popular Moonlight Drive-In restaurant in Titusville. Hamed is the current owner of the eatery, which has been in his family for many years and is now for sale. "We were here during [the] launch of Apollo 11," he remembers. "The windows shook so bad that we thought they [would] break."
Photograph by Robert Ormerod, National GeographicAlyssia Pickens, 12, stands inside the American Space Museum in Titusville, Florida. Pickens, whose grandmother works at the museum, grew up in Titusville, in the shadow of Kennedy Space Centre. She was a baby when she saw her first rocket launch, she says, and she remembers a time when rockets—and the rumbling ground—used to frighten her. "Now they don't scare me," she says. "I am so into space."
Photograph by Robert Ormerod, National GeographicSporting spacesuit costumes, visitors to Kennedy Space Centre's Saturn V building pose inside a photo booth. Special effects create an image that will make them look like astronauts floating above the moon's surface, with Earth rising in the distance.
Photograph by Robert Ormerod, National GeographicCarrying nearly 6,000 pounds of payload, the Dragon spacecraft launches aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Centre on June 3, 2017.
Photograph by Bill Ingalls, NASAA troop leader for the Boy Scouts of America and an amateur rocketry fan, Karl Brandt prepares a rocket for launch at an amateur rocketry gathering in Palm Bay, Florida.
Photograph by Robert Ormerod, National Geographic