Space Camp Day 4

     Up and at it, of course with a full breakfast once again!  Today we started off with group pictures, and even at 8:00 in the morning it was already hot outside.  We got our flight suits and headed out into the sun.  After that we went to "Ask Mr. Sun Spot" which was all about the sun.  During this session we received some special glasses that filter out the light so that you can actually look at the sun with them on and see what it looks like.  We also got to use a solar telescope that once again is filtered so that it is safe to look at and magnify the sun and it was really cool.  You could see it up so close and see the loops that were being sent off of it.  We also got to look at the Sunspotter which creates the outline of the sun and shows the dark sun spot areas on a piece of paper.  Then it was time for lunch which was Roast Beef, hot dogs other stuff, and then warm peach cobbler and ice cream for desert. YUM!! (I hope I can still fit into my flight suit by the end of this experience!

     Then we went and built water rockets.  We worked in teams of 4-5 and are looking forward to test firing them tomorrow, as well as our solid fuel rockets we built yesterday.  Then we went through some different math activities before it was time to go over to the US Space and Rocket Museum.  They currently have the "A Dinosaur Named Sue" exhibit which was really neat to see the T-rex skeleton.  The also have a group of 3 camp employees building a scale model of the stacked shuttle, launch pad, and crawler out of Knex.  It was amazing to see, they also had what looked like a guy laying down made out of Knex.  The next step was on to our Atantis Mission.

     We had several team members feeling under the weather so we had to make some quick last second changes.  I remained as a payload specialist doing science experiments in the orbiter.  It was a fun mission.  We made bouncy balls, tested diffusion, watched wave reactions, looked at color filtration effects and also lung capacity.  We were busy, but still made sure we had some fun with both the flight deck and the spacewalkers.  We had everything from having to do "fungal" testing on the space walkers shoes,  having an "alien" attack, and of course some toilet target practice.  Even so, we still managed to get everything done and have a successful mission!

     From there we went back to the U.S. Space and Rocket Center and were treated to a fantastic party which included eating a wonderful buffet, a chocolate dipping fountain, a live band, and all of it underneath the mighty Saturn 5 Rocket with a lunar lander and vehicle behind the band and right next to the Apollo 16 capsule that safely brought home one of our last astronaut groups from the moon.  We were also honored to have Homer H. Hickman, a former NASA Engineer, and author of several books, including the book "Rocket Boys" which Hollywood turned into the movie October Sky, and they are currently working on a musical!  He was signing books and talking to everyone which made an already great night even better!  One last day tomorrow and I am looking forward to launching the rockets and we also have our graduation tomorrow night.  Now it is off to bed because it is late!

Space Academy Adventure

          <-------                          ------->