Imagine for a moment, a seventh-grader, complete with middle school awkward and the unsureness that comes with the territory. Now put him on a plane to Alabama about a month into a new school year at a new school. Yep, that was me, nervous, excited, ready. I was on my way to Space Camp in Huntsville Alabama, for a week of real astronaut training at the US Space and Rocket Center, and I was thrilled!
We got up at about 3 A.M. to get ourselves across the state and to the airport, and we were not awake. There were a few of us from Wisconsin on the trip, but I only knew one guy, and even him not that well. We’ll call him Mike. Mike was much older than me, a junior or senior in high school, and we got on all right. We chatted about what we were expecting, rockets and space and space and rockets, and that was about that.
When we landed in Huntsville, a car took us to the facilities themselves, and I was blown away. They had a whole outdoor plaza filled with real, huge rockets, towering over the museum and casting long shadows as we made our way to the dorms they call the Habitats.
The Habitat was a building that was like something out of sci-fi, a multi-tiered walkway around a central opening with rooms lining the outside, the walls a strange corrugated metal. It only added to the wow factor of being at Space Camp for me, and I didn’t sleep much that night.
Early the next morning we woke up and met with the teams we had been assigned to the previous day and took a tour, as well as started to attend the classes featured throughout the week. I was, as I said, in seventh grade, so most of this is rather fuzzy at this point, but I remember going to classes on the history of the Shuttle Program, one about what we’ve accomplished in space, one about space life, food and other amenities on the ISS, or the International Space Station. There was even a class where we built and launched model rockets.
SCIVIS, the program that runs the week for visually impaired students, is absolutely incredible. Nothing about the program is changed from what any other sighted student would do over the course of the week. Instead, books and materials are brailed, and the orbiter was fitted with a software which read important information and spoken commands that were given by the pilot and copilot. That was one of the coolest parts of the week, was just being in a normal environment, going through the program with no special treatment, just being kids and learning about space.
The coolest part of the whole thing, however, was the missions. We all divided into groups, some manning a real simulated orbiter called the Atlantis, others in the ISS conducting scientific experiments, still others on the ground in a simulated Mission Control Center. This is where I was for our first mission, watching the weather and going through complex checklists we were given. It was incredible. We all felt like real NASA employees, making sure all systems were nominal (we even got to say the word nominal, which made us feel awesome) and conducting a life-like mission to the ISS. The orbiter even docked, undocked and landed back on Earth. For a bunch of kids, it was the experience of a lifetime.
That’s about all I remember about my first experience. I was fortunate enough to attend a second time in high school, where we got to do some of the same things again, but also scuba-diving in a huge tank to simulate weightlessness. This was the highlight of that trip by a mile, as I jumped to a 10-foot-tall basketball hoop and slam dunked a bowling ball because of physics! And the entire time, I was learning.
Another highlight was our second mission my first time attending, as I became a Mission Specialist. Basically, MS means you get to do EVA, or Extra Vehicular Activity. This is just a fancy term for space walks! I got to sit in a chair counterbalanced with water to simulate zero gravity and had to navigate a platform by moving along it hand over hand and fixing a broken piece outside the orbiter. It was so strange, knowing I was on Earth, yet being suspended 15 feet in the air feeling like I was weightless. And to add to the fun, I got to land us back at Kennedy Space Center after the mission. Our pilot was totally blind, and asked me to come land the shuttle, something I did, not very gracefully, but I did it, and it was an amazing moment.
We learned more than just about space, but about collaboration, teamwork, and the ability for us to be one unit. From climbing a tower and ziplining off the top, to team building ropes-course like activities, it built us stronger and what an experience it was! And all of this was before we got to ride the rides, as it were.
Space Camp features real equipment used to demonstrate the various mechanics of spaceflight, from a controllable chair that really hovers, to the M.A.T., or the Multi-Axis-Trainer, a gyroscope-like ball that is built to show how it would feel to spin out of control in an orbiter in an environment where gravity was non-existent. I personally was not a fan of that one, as it sent you spinning in every conceivable direction at once, and was quite disorienting. But it was an experience. Another one of the pieces of equipment we got to use was the 1/6 chair, a chair with a harness and pulleys that simulated the gravity of the moon. It was here that I had my proudest moment. Jumping up and down, I exclaimed, “It’s one small step for man, and one giant leap for man blind.”
From experiencing zero gravity, riding real simulators, and getting to know other blind students from around the country and around the world, to working with a team and learning about the real mechanics of spaceflight, Space Camp was the experience of a lifetime I was fortunate enough to experience twice. I even uploaded videos to my YouTube channel after the fact, even though looking at them now makes me cringe. But I did some amazing things, and learned a lot as I did them.
