NASA Touches Down at Super Bowl Festival

It's almost time for the 2017 Super Bowl, and visitors to the game's host city of Houston should make their way to Discovery Green in the city's downtown starting tomorrow (Jan. 28). There, they'll find a very special space-centric experience. 

Houston is, of course, home to NASA's Johnson Space Center, so it was fitting that NASA and various private spaceflight companies should contribute to Super Bowl Live, the nine-day festival starting Saturday (Jan. 28) that will lead up to the big game. The primary attraction of the festival is a Mars-themed ride called "Future Flight," which takes riders on a trip to Mars and back using virtual reality goggles on a 90-foot (27 meters) drop-tower ride. 

In general, the mix of space and football will be strong in Houston this coming week. Meanwhile, up on the space station, NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson volunteered to let two of her crewmates throw her like a football, demonstrating the joys of microgravity.

Visitors to the 250,000-square-foot (76,000 square meters) expanse of Super Bowl Live will "get a chance to see a model of NASA's Orion spacecraft that's used for water-recovery training, a replica of the Mars Curiosity rover currently exploring the Red Planet, a rover-like space-exploration vehicle concept that could be used for in-space missions or to explore planetary surfaces, space station exhibits, and other interactive space-related content," according to a statement from NASA. 

There are also displays and exhibits from companies in the spaceflight industry, like a virtual reality trip to Mars via Lockheed Martin. Northrop Grumman will set up its full-size replica of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, the real version of which is scheduled to launch in 2018. Other companies that contributed exhibits to the festival include Aerojet Rocketdyne, Boeing, Orbital ATK and the Raytheon Company. 

Follow Calla Cofield @callacofield. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.