Thread: Grand Turk Attraction Earns Top Honors from Porthole Magazine

New Splashdown! Grand Turk Attraction Earns Top Honors from Porthole Magazine

Posted on 17 March 2011.

• In this Friday, Jan. 28, 2011, photo release by Carnival Corp., former space shuttle astronaut Winston Scott, right, discusses a replica of Friendship 7 with Turks & Caicos Island Gov. Gordon Wetherell, left, and Janet Petro, deputy director of NASA's John F. Kennedy Space Center, in Grand Turk, Turks & Caicos.

• The reproduction of the Mercury space capsule is a center point of "Splashdown Grand Turk," a new educational attraction at the Grand Turk Cruise Terminal developed by Miami-based Carnival Corp. in conjunction with NASA, to commemorate Friendship 7's 1962 landing with astronaut John Glenn off Grand Turk.
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  At a ceremony held earlier this week at the annual Cruise Shipping Miami convention, the Grand Turk Cruise Center was presented with Porthole Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief Award for “Best Interactive Cruise Exhibit” for its new attraction that pays tribute National Aeronautics & Space Administration’s Mercury space program and the historic 1962 splashdown of the Friendship 7 capsule off the island’s cost.

The 3,500-square-foot Splashdown! Grand Turk exhibit features amazing replicas unique to the Mercury space program, including a scaled 20-foot-tall Atlas rocket and a full-size, three-dimensional replica of astronaut John Glenn in spacesuit, and, of course, a detailed replica of the Friendship 7 capsule, which splashed into the Atlantic in 1962, a few short miles from the island of Grand Turk.


Opened in 2006, the Grand Turk Cruise Center is operated by Carnival Corporation & plc and hosts nearly 625,000 passengers annually.


First picture: Shuttle astronaut Winston Scott, right, discusses a replica of Friendship 7 with Turks & Caicos Island Gov. Gordon Wetherell, left, and Janet Petro, deputy director of NASA's John F. Kennedy Space Center, in Grand Turk, Turks & Caicos


Pictured here at the ceremony are (from left): Porthole Editor-in-Chief Bill Panoff, Carnival Corporation & plc’s Director of Business Development David Candib and Senior Vice President of Port and Destination Development Giora Israel.

LOVED Grand Turk - this exhibit was cool! Great port - hope to return soon...

In 3 weeks I will check this out