The "Right Stuff"

Day 2 of Space Camp gained me an entire 15 minutes of blissful sleep, as I was able to delay my wake-up until 6:15 AM; we didn't leave until 7:30 for the US Space and Rocket Center, the grounds of space camp. Huntsville was blessed today with rain - but luckily we were blessed with activities indoors almost the entire day.

Our first activity of the day was a visit to Hudson Alpha, a biotech research facility in Huntsville. One notable thing about Huntsville is that it has the second largest research park in the US - so there are many scientists, engineers, and other researchers who live and work here. Hudson Alpha was built to provide common building space to scientists researching biotech areas (mainly genetics/pharmaceuticals with human health), and businesses whose job is to promote (aka sell) these types of things.

One of the things that is difficult in the US is the agonizing length of time it takes to take a scientist's idea for a new drug or treatment and put it into action with real patients - would you believe that this averages 17 years? Hudson Alpha, because it has all of these people using the same space, thinks that they can lessen that time. They also employ educators to do student outreach - because the idea of biotech and STEM has to be encouraged to the youth in Alabama so there are educated young people to eventually fill these positions. We met with one of the educators today in a state-of-the-art laboratory (our group was lucky, the other groups had conference rooms) to conduct a DNA extraction experiment.

Now I have done DNA extraction before, it's actually one of my favorite labs to do in 7th grade - but this one provided a bit more inquiry (which I liked a lot!) - having each person choose the type of food (where the DNA comes from), the soap (lysis medium), other reagents (like contact solution, meat tenderizer, etc). Normally at school, I have my students use bananas. Today I extracted DNA from kiwi, using Dial body wash, contact lens solution, salt, water, and ethyl alcohol. I even have a small centrifuge container of my extracted DNA. Very fun! We also received great goodies to bring back to school for life science - right up my alley, and a very cool app for teaching cells - iCell. This is a free app for iPhone/iPod touch, iPad, and they are currently working on an app for Droid. There is also a web-based version. If you are interested in the app - search for iCell - it is the hudson alpha one! It is well worth exploring!

After our trip to research park and a hearty German lunch, we headed to the Educator Training Facility to hear a briefing about Expedition Living. Most of the things that I heard in this session I had previously learned through my tours at Johnson Space Center when I went in 2009 for 21st Century Explorer training. We were able to see space food, talk about showering, sleeping, and yes... going to the bathroom in space. All of the things that most people "really wanna know."

A huge highlight today was listening to Ed Buckbee, who had many roles with the space program. He worked at Marshall Space Flight Center (in Huntsville) working for rocket scientist Wernher von Braun. He was also a NASA public affairs officer, working with the original Mercury 7 "Right Stuff" astronauts, Gemini astronauts, and Apollo astronauts. He had AMAZING stories about what the program was like in its infancy - what the original astronauts were like, and the untold stories of different missions. Ed was also instrumental in starting the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville as well as Space Camp, for both kids and teachers. We each received an autographed copy of his book & DVD "The Real Space Cowboys" which is all about the original Mercury 7.

Then it was off to astronaut simulators. We were able to try out 2 different simulators today - the multi-axis trainer (which simulates how astronauts' bodies lose their sense of direction/balance in space because of limited gravity). For this activity, you were strapped in and swung around and around in different circles. We were also able to "moonwalk" using a bungee chair and walk across the moon with 1/6th gravity. I have video to prove that I did this - but for some reason blogger won't let me upload it tonight!

Before our mission, we took a brief tour of Rocket Park, one of the original exhibits in the Space and Rocket Center. We were able to see replicas of many different types of rockets, including those that took Mercury and Gemini to space. Off in the distance we could see the Saturn 5, the rocket that took the Apollo missions to the Moon.

Finally - time for our mission on the orbiter Atlantis! I headed off to Mission Control, while others on my team headed to the orbiter or the ISS (Space Station). As a team, we completed a launch, orbit, dock to the ISS, re-entry, and landing. As Capcom, my job was to listen to what was happening in Mission Control and relay that info to the Commander and Pilot, who would also relay info back to me. It was a lot of multi-tasking, but it was so much fun! And honestly, the 2 hour mission was over almost as quickly as it started. The ISS crew came in to Mission Control as we finished, and they remarked that we sounded like the real mission control. We have a new mission practice tomorrow so I am excited to find out what my new job is, although I will be sad to leave Mission Control as it is my favorite place.

Our last activity of the evening was Mission Patches. Our team is working on a design for a mission patch that we will share at our graduation ceremony on Monday night.

Tomorrow's agenda is filled with touring the US Space and Rocket Center, a visit to the gift shop (yea!), mission training, space writer and rocketry sessions, Dinosaur exhibit, and the Aviation Challenge concludes our day!

An image to leave you with, picture of the Saturn 5 Rocket at night as we boarded the bus back to Charger Village!

(PS... sadly I found that when I checked with Canon on my camera issue, it recommended to send it in for repair. :-( I used my iTouch camera today - not terrible, but I have a lot of new buddies with pictures. The beauty of Space Camp - everyone has a camera!)