Spaced Out

Yesterday I breathed my first New York air in two weeks. It's strange, but I missed the smell. I arrived in a plane, took a bus from Newark, then rode the N train from Port Authority. I'm finally back among people, with all the sounds and sights that such proximity implies. I read my book in between glances out the window on the bus. I finish the book just as we cross from Jersey into Manhattan. Trying to maneuver two wheeled bags through the Times Square area forces me back into my New York walk: head down and silently encouraging people to get out of my way or be run over. It's good to be home.

I left the City two weeks ago for Huntsville. However, this wasn't a standard go-down-and-see-the-folks vacation. Instead, I was utilizing my family's new location to fulfill a childhood dream and secure the educational futures of my students. That's right; I went to Space Camp.

My arrival at Space Camp was fairly uneventful. After a couple days of relaxing with the 'rents, I got dropped off and entered a college dorm on UAH's campus, where I was to be staying with just over two dozen other educators, all in Huntsville for Space Camp. A couple of them had already arrived, and I ended up going out with some of them for dinner. Once the introductions were through, it was clear that I was the youngest person around the table, I was the only one without kids, and the only unmarried one. Regardless, we all got along famously, and even though we were to be split up into two teams the following day, it seemed that there was going to be a lot of positive interaction between the teams even if we were supposed to be competing. For the record, Team Unity was infinitely superior to Team Destiny.

Day One of Space Camp for Educators started out with a breakfast and the splitting of our group into the aforementioned teams. Team Destiny went off and did their own thing while Team Unity and I got a quick tour of the US Space and Rocket Center followed by some team-building exercises. First, some name-remembering games. Fifteen minutes of that, and I had everyone's name down, except for the people who went after me. Now that we knew how to address each other, it was clearly time to get physically close to one another. We tied a human knot.

No, we didn't just tie a human knot, we made a knot that would make Gordius cringe. Linked hand-in-hand, we struggled to free ourselves, complimented each other's deodorant, and finally managed to get ourselves out 44 minutes later. Oh, and we did this while standing in the middle of a public museum, under a Saturn V rocket. After a few minutes of this, the tourists were taking more pictures of us than of the rocket.

We broke for lunch soon after untying ourselves and then went back to the museum for our group picture, for which we all had to don our flight suits. Then we went to our first lecture, which dealt with the various parts of the shuttle and how it all works, seeing as our missions that week were going to involve the shuttle heavily. So now I know the difference between the SSMEs and the SRBs, I know when Max-Q and MECO occur during ascent, and I know how the OMS are used in descent. I also know that if the ECLSS fails on our mission, we're all screwed.

We had a brief overview of what our missions would entail and what the various positions would be, then we got to put in our requests for where we wanted to be on the missions. We could be in the Space Station, in the Orbiter, or in Mission Control. I was most interested in being in Mission Control or the Orbiter. My top choice was CAPCOM, or Capsule Communications, the one person on the ground who talks to the crew of the Orbiter. I think I was really looking forward to being able to say, "Sorry, but we really don't know how to help you. Best of luck."

Our last activity that day was designing our team mission patch. This was a really interesting idea that ended up focusing our whole team on what we wanted to accomplish, what we valued, and how we saw ourselves getting through the week to come. It's the kind of thing I really want to try with my students in the fall.

One day into our collective adventure, I already knew that there were some really special teachers in our little band. As teams, and as a whole group, we all seemed to get along well, despite barely knowing each other. It's amazing what a little knot tying will do to bring a group of strangers together.