Day 3: Failure is not an option...

Day 3 started out with a bang! We went to the rocket launch area to blast off the rockets we made yesterday. Everyone's rocket launched successfully and we had none that got stuck in a tree. 

Notice our awesome NASA shirts!

Here is everyone setting up their rockets on the launch lad with our friend 'The Wanderer', Scott from Syracuse, NY. He likes to explore while wandering away from our group. He always comes back though. :)

Here they are all lined up and ready to go!

When it was our turn, we went up to the launch control panel and had our count down. 3,2,1 and blast off! We pushed the button and our rockets went sailing. 

This is Tackett's rocket. Her parachute didn't deploy quite right. It had a dramatic crash landing, but it will be able to redeem itself in another launch attempt very soon. 

After the rocket launch, we had some very coveted time in the gift shop. No pictures, but our team was REALLY happy that Katie let us finally go there. She has been holding out all week long and guess what, we have gift shop time tomorrow too!!!! :):):) 

Then we had another photo shoot before our Orion Mission practice. 

Here are our friends Ulises and Even! Can you tell we love the Even pose? 

We had to get another pic with our favorite 'dad' Jeff. He is the commander on this mission and will take good care of our crew for the trip. 

Here are our two partners in crime, Jersey and Chelsea. We have had a good time finding our way through some challenges and maybe bending the rules a little. Or as we like to call it, thinking outside of the box. 

We couldn't resist adding our leader Katie in the mix. She loves it when we 'think outside the box'!

We will give more details about our mission tomorrow, but wanted to share Tackett's 'weightless' pic from the mission practice. This is D and Christine. They are going to be on her team tomorrow! They can't wait to do some experiments in space!!! 

We had some down time after practice and was able to watch the IMAX movie 'Magnificent Desolation'. It was about the moon missions and what the future might hold for travel there someday. It was a good movie and we didn't get any motion sickness from it. Jeff even got us a treat for the movie. Rock CANDY! 

After lunch, we had the privilege of hearing Ed Buckbee speak. He is the author of the book The Real Space Cowboys. He told stories about the golden days of space travel. It was really neat to hear firsthand experiences with the giants that we teach about in space exploration. The personal stories made this experience unique and memorable. We can't wait to share some of these stories when we go back home to teach. 

The end of his presentation was really poignant. He makes a good point when he talks about how everyone is important in a big job like landing a man on the moon. Without the effort of thousands, that one man would just be stuck on Earth! It is all about teamwork. I sense a theme at Space Camp!

  

The last challenge of the day was to construct a heat shield out of common household materials. This shield would have to protect an egg from a flame torch for 3 minutes. The egg could not cook or be charred. We had a budget for each material and a time limit of 20 minutes. It was tough and we were tired.

 We finished right on budget and with time to spare. We are that good! So now it was time to test our shield. Not gonna lie, we were nervous. All went well in the first minute and a half. No fire, no smoke, and no melting.

After that, we had a bit of melt down. Our steel and spackle was holding up, but it seems that our polyester felt caught on fire. That kind of charred our lasagna noodle too. It looked like our egg was going to bust. However, when we cracked it open, the egg was declared not cooked! Looking back we did think of some things that we would do differently like get rid of the flame cloth.

This wasn't part of our day, but we wanted to share this picture. It is of the 'habitat' where the children of Space Camp stay. Kelly immediately thought of a gerbil habitat. So picture some students doing things like: running in wheels, drinking from a gerbil water bottle, being locked in their cages... rooms, and so on. Every time we walk by it, we giggle. They won't let us go in there, so we will just have to imagine what it looks like. 

Tomorrow we have our Aviation Challenge, our Orion Mission, and MORE GIFT SHOP time. Until then...

Kelly & Tackett, 

over and out!

Day 2: Mission Accomplished

Day two at Space Camp started off the same as day one. We woke up at our early morning wake up time after being too excited to sleep the night before (again), and headed to the bus station for some more ridiculously crazy pictures.

Seriously, how many more pictures will we take like this? Probably at least a dozen more. :)

Then we headed for our first activity of the day: some team-building exercises at Area 51.

Our first activity was a hoop challenge. We each had to put two fingers under a hula hoop and slowly lower the hula hoop to the ground as a team. No one could take their fingers off the hula hoop at any time or move their fingers into a different position. We totally rocked this activity!

Our next activity was a little more challenging. It was called "Traffic Jam" and was similar to a checkers game where only certain people could move at any given time. We gave the strategy to this game some serious thought...

Meanwhile, our teammate Even worked out a strategy using materials he found. It was amazing watching his brain methodically work out the madness to this game.

It took us a while, but we got it! This is our "Even" pose after accomplished our task!

After our Area 51 challenges, we suited up to get ready for our Shuttle Mission. We were both really excited to work with our team to complete our first mission!

We each had two different positions. Tackett was CAPCOM in MOCR (which is NASA speak for Mission Control). She was the only source of communication between the shuttle crew and Mission Control, and if the crew ran into any problems, she had to figure out how to solve them and relay any messages to the crew. It was so much fun, but incredibly stressful...especially when the computers in the shuttle actually broke (and no, that wasn't supposed to be part of our simulation) and she spent 15 minutes prior to the technicians showing up trying to figure out what was happening. Can we say, "Houston, we have a problem?" Here are some pictures of the CAPCOM in action...

While Tackett was busy on Mission Control, Kelly was chillin at the ISS (International Space Station). Her job was Station Specialist 1 on board with a few friends. The 1st half of the mission was spent working on experiments and preforming some on-board system checks.

 Ok and we pretended to be weightless a little bit...

Then the 2nd half, she got to preform an EVA (extravehicular activity) outside of the space station. It was really cool to put on a space suit and take a ride on the 1/6th gravity machine. This machine made it feel like you would if you were on the moon. However, it was really hard to move in the suit and trying to build the struts on the station. Being an astronaut is HARD work... but totally awesome!

After our mission and lunch, we had some teacher resource time with our leader Katie. We made these bracelets to remember the different space missions and how many people could travel on them. What a great way to remember information and look fashionable!

One of our teammates, Orielle, is from Australia. She brought the cutest little roos and koalas to share with us at space camp. It was a neat idea to bring a little of the down under up to the USA! <3

Then it was time to MAKE ROCKETS! We started with an Estes kit that even had a payload dock. The rocket man said that they used to carry crickets in the payloads, but got too many complaints about rockets/crickets stuck in trees. So, we will have to come up with our own payload to launch.

 After assembling the rockets (with much fun and trouble making), we were ready to decorate. They let us spray paint them out on the lawn. Here are some teaser pictures for our finished product. There will be more to come tomorrow after we launch them in the morning.

Appropriately after we made the rockets, we visited rocket park. This is an area of the camp that has... a lot of rockets. Go figure. We learned a little history and got to see some models and actual rockets that had been launched. 

This is Jeff. He is the adopted space dad of the week. He kinda rules! He volunteers to take pics for us, gives us advice, and we might even ask to drive us to the mall tomorrow... :)

He took this great picture for us! 

 We also took a closer look at the museum in the rocket center. We especially loved the mock Mercury capsule that you could climb in to see what it felt like to be Alan Shepard.

 This is Tackett working hard. 

Kelly is wondering how she got in here and where did her glasses go?!

 Now how is she going to get out?????

They had a model of the walkway so you could feel what it would be like to walk on the shuttle. 

 As you read in an earlier entry, Melissa used to watch the Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen video 'The Case of the Space Camp Mystery. This moon rock was featured in the video along with astronaut Alan Bean. She couldn't resist posing with her favorite movie artifact! He wrote below the rock that he remembered this rock and it was his favorite. It is hers too!

This picture doesn't really make sense, but we couldn't find this for the scavenger hunt yesterday... so we put it in today. These are hand casts that they took to make the Apollo 11 crews' gloves. They specially fit all of the space equipment to each astronaut.

Later in the evening, we had a workshop on lego robots! We had to give explanations to each other to build our own specially made lego creations.

Look at the Wall-e legos we made!

The best part was programming our robots to draw on some paper. We used smelly markers which happen to be the best markers ever. The final design looked like a Spirograph.

This was the final design for our art. You may purchase it through Tackett or Kelly and the highest bidder will be the proud owner of this coveted piece of art. Bidding starts now...

It was another great day at Space Camp. Above all, we got to know our team better and appreciate everyone for sharing their love of science and teaching. It is amazing to work with teachers from all over the world who come from such different places, but have the same passion for the profession.

GO TEAM ZARYA! 

Kelly & Tackett, 

Over and out!