This summer the Rocket Tower at the award winning National Space Centre will be lifting off to new heights as the most exciting development in the Centre’s nine year history launches.

Launching on 17 July 2010, Space Race will coincide with the leading Leicester tourist attraction welcoming over 2million visitors through its doors and is the culmination of over two years of work to create a new experience that will take visitors on an amazing journey through the imagination of man and onto surface of the moon.

Deck One is the start of the journey and visitors young and old can encounter real rockets, sit back in the Edwardian cinema to see the first sci-fi movie ever made, take part in the interactive Space Race quiz or even blast off into space with the ultimate water rocket challenge, will you back the US or the USSR in this adventure into space?

Deck Two includes not one but two highlight attractions within Space Race, the Gagarin Experience and the Silo.  Within the Gagarin Experience visitors become Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, as they sit inside the Vostok Capsule and blast off into space.

Malika Andress, Head of Marketing at the National Space Centre said of the Gagarin Experience; “Could you sit in a metal box measuring just 2.3m across for 89 minutes while travelling 315km above the Earth’s surface at 28,000kph? Imagine your heart racing at over 157bpm and you are the first person to ever travel in a spacecraft that only has a 50% success rate!  I can’t wait to climb in and try it and I know all our visitors will be blown away by this”

The Silo is one of the most technologically advanced interactive experiences in the UK and in an attraction dedicated to the futuristic space industry you wouldn’t expect anything less.  Visitors will be immersed in an audio visual experience that will whisk them back to 1950s Russia and the dawn of the Space Race.