Words and even pictures can’t effectively depict how immensely gargantuan the inside of the Vehicle Assembly Building is. The VAB boasts a volume equivalent to almost 4-Empire State Buildings. Photo featuring fellow NASA Social selectee, passionate science educator, and author, Valeria (@valeriar1), for scale.

Everything’s bigger in NASA. This is the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB)—the world’s largest one-story building. It was used to construct the Apollo Saturn V rockets and space shuttles. It is now being used to build the new SLS rocket that will hopefully send American astronauts to Mars by sometime in the 2030’s.

These are some of the remarkable individuals that I was given the opportunity to share my experiences with. I was surrounded by a diverse group of tech experts, producers, writers, business owners, engineers, and educators. Being a lowly college student, I was humbled in their presence. (Photo by: @valeriar1)

During some downtime I had the chance to visit the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, a public museum near NASA’s private facilities. Featured here is the Space Shuttle Atlantis. On July 8, 2011 it was launched one final time to close out the Shuttle Program. If you’re ever in the area, the Visitor Complex is a one of a kind destination and a must see.

This is one of NASA’s crawler-transporters—what they once used to move their Space Shuttles and what they currently use to move their rockets. It's hard to grasp how massive it is, but pictured here are 20ish people standing underneath one. It’s about as large as baseball infield, it weighs about as much as 15 Statue of Liberties, it's as tall as a 2-3 story building, and it can carry the weight of over 20 Boeing-777 planes. When it’s fully loaded this crawler-transporter travels at a blistering top speed of 1 mile per hour.

The Atlas V 401 rocket was launched exactly at 11:11am EST on April 18, 2017. I would’ve made a wish, but everything I could’ve wished for was right in front of me. Just as the rocket launched a pod of dolphins jumped by in the water in front of us.

On the day before the mission we were able visit the launch pad. This was NASA Orbital ATK's seventh mission as part of the Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) Program for the International Space Station. The Cygnus Spacecraft, which held supplies along with several experiments to be conducted on the Space Station, rested on an Atlas V 401 rocket. Cygnus docked onto the International Space Station and will be there until July 17, 2017. After its time is up, the Cygnus spacecraft will perform a controlled destructive reentry back to Earth.

I was able to network with and befriend some of my fellow NASA social selectees. Featured in this photo is Steven (@smfies) taking in our first sights of Kennedy Space Center. Steven and I happened to share the same Airbnb in Florida. He’s a marketing and branding expert, the best selling author of three books, the owner of two businesses, a mentor in the field of emotional intelligence, and an all around great guy.

I felt like the enormity of the Vehicle Assembly Building warranted 2 photos. By volume, the building could house the Pentagon with room to spare, and was used to shoot scenes from the Transformers movie.

About 10-15 seconds after lift off I felt the aftershock of the blast blow through me and heard the thunderous rocket for the first time. As it ascended into the atmosphere the blast seemed to get louder and louder until the spacecraft disappeared into the heavens. It was allover within a minute.