What do you get an aviation nut for his 40th birthday? I did Concorde, the vomit comet is a tad pricey, so it came down to a trip to Space Camp. You may have seen the 1986 movie, it's not terribly good, so I didn't watch it again. Instead I got myself a flight and set off for the 6 day Adult Space Camp experience.
When you mentioned Space Camp, most people think of kids and it is certainly set up for kids - with capacity for 800 at a time through the summer. It's less well known that they have Adult Camps through the year, these come in 3, 6 and 8 day durations. The 6 day camp ran Sunday to Friday.
General Stuff:
On the face of it, Space Camp is pretty good value for money. For $850 you get accommodation in the "Hab", 3 meals a day and the loan of a flight suit. I actually bought my own clothing kit, it's hanging in the cupboard - I'll probably wear it for a convention. Sounds good? It isn't really. I'm too old and far too tall to sleep on a bunkbed designed for a 10 year old, and the meals had strong resonance for somebody who spent some time at a Boys Only Public school in England. On the other hand, there was a perfectly serviceable Marriott on the site. Space Camp itself is on the site of the Space and Rocketry museum, and being at camp essentially gives you free range around the museum at all times, I'll talk about that more later.
The site itself is where Werner Von Braun built the Saturn Vs. More on that later.
Camp: Day 1
My first day was somewhat marred by the failure of my SIM card, which was something of a blessing in disguise. I got a PAYG SIM for the duration which meant that nobody from work could get hold of me. Given the timetable they presented us with, this turned out to be a good thing. Space Camp is a lot of fun, a huge amount, but it is also quite hard work. They're geared up for keeping pre-teens and teens busy for huge chunks of the day and they make sure that they're busy pretty much from dawn to late at night.
At registration you get assigned a team. The adults were split into 2 teams of 13, I was in the Kennedy team. Each team is further divided into the Pilot track and the Mission Specialist track. On the Shuttle missions the Pilot track are pilot's and commander, on the space station missions they're relegated to Flight Engineering roles. Everybody has a mission or two in Mission Control.
First observation: Space Camp is for fun, it is not training to be in NASA. I was lucky in my team selection, we were all out to have a good time. The other team were a rather more disparate set of characters, several of whom were pretty far along the Asperger's Syndrome curve, several others were seriously using this as an opportunity to train for joining NASA. As part of the experience you can either buy or borrow NASA style flight suits. For each flight suit you have a name badge attached with velcro, until you complete the course your status as a trainee is evident by the badge being stuck on upside down.
The rest of the day, post ice-breaker, was spent touring the facilities and having some orientation activities.
The 6 Day program involved 4 60 minute missions and, on the final day, a 6 hour all day mission. Each 60 minute mission has a 90 minute training period. Around each of the missions you have a series of lectures and activities.
We then had to design a mission patch for our team. Easier said than done with the available computing power, but we made it in the end.
I retired to my bunk and had a long and uncomfortable night.
Camp: Day 2
I awoke with a fairly strong conviction that I was going to spend the rest of the trip in the Marriott. They have a bar, what other decision could I come to? With that, I showered and set off for the first morning. Our first activity was a series of Command Tests. These will be familiar to anybody who has done military training or team building. They're all pretty similar, which coupled to some people who'd been to space camp before, meant that we were pretty good at getting through them like a dose of salts.
We trained for our first mission, listened to a former rocket engineer and retired to lunch.
Post lunch we had a talk from Georg Von Tiesenhausen. He wasn't in the first group who came over with Von Braun, but he had worked with Von Braun at Piedemunde and was invited over personally in the second batch. He's in his mid-90s now and gave an excellent talk on the nature of space time. It'll probably be the last lecture I see where the person giving it had an OHP and acetates. Amusingly, having bitten my tongue earlier about the war and avoided humming Tom Lehrer songs in the museum around the V2 we were actually told not to mention the war. It's happened in the past and he packs up and walks away. Still, it was a fantastic experience.
We had Mission Training all afternoon. For the second mission I was drawn and mission commander, the person who gets to fly the shuttle. For the first one I was in mission control. Post training we had a tour of the museum, ending with a private tour of the new Saturn V exhibit.
They have a full size model outside the museum, but it's not real. The real one used to be kept on it's side on the ground outside. The trouble was the Saturn V wasn't designed to spend 40 years lying out in the elements. Realising that it was literally rotting away, they had to do something. They've built a complete new facility to house the rocket and it's quite something to see. The payload is a dummy, but the 3 main stages are the real deal.
Our final activity was the mutli-axis trainer. People may remember this from the movie, sadly the movie version was a prop. Once you're in the thing, you're along for the rather comfortable ride. Still, it was huge fun.
To round off the day we went ATO (Abort to Ottars; the bar in the Marriott). I checked into the hotel, had a couple of drinks with the team and crawled into bed...
Camp: Day 3
A nice breakfast in the hotel today, followed by a new activity, building rockets. I'd been bought a junior rocket kit when I was a kid. The only problem was that it turned out that in the early 80s the British authorities took a dim view of model rocket building and I could never get the motor. More on the rockets later.
We had a talk from Ed Buckbee next. Ed is the director and founder of Space Camp. He joined the space program as a PR guy during the very early days of the Mercury project and published a book, "The Real Space Cowboys" about the Mercury 7 astronauts. He was a good friend of Alan Shepherd and Wally Schira. We got a free copy of the book and a pretty interesting talk.
Before lunch we had an hour in the Shuttle flight simulators.
After lunch we did the first two of our missions.
There are 4 missions in total. You rotate positions but they're all pretty similar. I did 2 spells in Mission Control, one as a Flight Engineer in the Space Station and one as Commander in the shuttle.
I think I'll write up the missions separately.
Camp: Day 4
After breakfast we picked roles for the Extended Mission - in order to avoid a fight later, we agreed to have separate Pilot and Commander for the launch and return parts of the mission. I was picked as Commander for the launch phase.
We then spent a couple of hours terrifying the living hell out of each other by climbing telegraph poles. I'll draw a veil over this activity, I am lousy with heights, at least when it comes to climbing and didn't enjoy this remotely.
Next up was something I'd been looking forward to. A session in the Scuba tank doing zero gee simulation. This was amazing. They have a number of submerged bowling balls which are effectively neutrally bouyant under water, learning how to pass things and throw stuff to each other takes some doing, but after twenty minutes we were able to pass items pretty effectively. It wasn't perfect but it did rekindle an interest I have in learning to dive.
This was a pretty light day really. We had a talk from the museum curator, which included some excellent pictures of them moving the Saturn V to it's new home and then off to the Aviation Challenge.
Aviation Challenge is actually a sister camp to Space Camp. They do jet fighter training and flying. They've rooms full of 2 seater flight simulators networked together. So you have a chance to fly combat missions against each other. They're actually pretty hard to fly, but again great fun. After the flights we were given a spin in the Centrifuge. I now know what 3.1G feels like. It's not very comfortable.
Camp: Day 5
In true Astronaut style, the long duration mission starts with Steak and Eggs. Due to the need to stage the missions we had to spend an hour back playing with the flight simulators before we started the missions. I'll cover the mission elsewhere.
That evening we went out for dinner with the team and most of the camp staff. It was a good night and left me thankful that I'd packed painkillers in my luggage.
Camp: Day 6
Last day. Graduation. Flight home.
It was a great 6 days. Utterly exhausting and some stories can't really be told here, mostly because I shouldn't speak ill of people, as I said we had some seriously borderline personalities with us.
We won the prize for the best team, we got pictures taken and finally, we could put our name tags the right way up on our flight suits.
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