Nasa's space shuttle has flown its last mission, but at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), just outside Los Angeles, the robots of America's unmanned space programme still boldly go where no man will tread for a while yet. Even better, Nasa's charter mandates public outreach, which means that you can visit. Who needs Disneyland or a pricey tour of Universal Studios when you can wander around one of the world's top space research labs for free?
There were around 30 of us on the tour – you need to bring ID, which for non-US citizens means your passport. To my surprise, the "lab" is a whole campus, the size of a small university, and home to 5,000 scientists and other workers. Surrounded by hills covered in sagebrush, with a creek running through it and two deer nibbling the grass in front of the administration block, the site probably doesn't look too different from the way it did in 1936. That was when a group of students from the nearby California Institute of Technology (CalTech) formed a club to play with new-fangled things called rockets. Their fellow students dubbed them the Suicide Squad and banished them to this then empty corner of the San Gabriel foothills to blow themselves up in peace.
The first part of the tour, a film and a talk from the guides, was the least interesting. Introductory films are introductory films even when they're slickly done, as this one was. Just when we were getting impatient, though, we were off to see the real stuff, starting with Mission Control. The viewing gallery overlooks the darkened control floor with its banks of flashing and winking screens, monitored 24/7 by scientists in jeans and T-shirts. We were allowed to take photos and even my space-phobic husband admitted to feeling thrilled when told we were watching data arriving in real time from spaceships flying by Mars and Saturn and penetrating an asteroid belt.
From Mission Control we descended to the JPL gallery, which gives a history of the space programme in a state-of-the-art presentation that wouldn't disgrace a professional museum. While I examined a mock-up of one of the early planetary explorers – it looked like a giant black plastic bag on stilts – my husband found photos of the splendidly named "Miss Guided Missile", a 1950s beauty contest for JPL's female staff. (The name was later changed to "Queen of Outer Space" before the contest was abolished in 1970.)
The tour's highlight came at the end with a visit to the "clean room" (more like a clean hangar) where the robot vehicles are assembled in dust-free conditions by technicians in bunny suits (without the ears). We were lucky in our timing and got to look down on all 2,000 lbs of the Curiosity rover due to blast off to Mars this November. Then it was off to the shop where you can buy all sorts of cool stuff from postcards to Nasa flight jackets. It takes a little work to visit JPL: tours have to be booked three weeks in advance on their website, you need a car to get there, and there's a certain amount of hanging around. They don't make it altogether easy, but what they make possible is worth the effort. A bit like space travel, really.
• To book, visit jpl.nasa.gov. There is also an open weekend at JPL once a year, usually in May
