Day 5: Wednesday

I am writing this as a group of us sit in Huntsville Airport waiting for our flight to Dallas Fort Worth. It's rather nice to be here with others from camp instead of just by myself. We are lucky as many of our colleagues were transported to the airport at 4am this morning; we had a 2pm bus so have been able to hang around the Space and Rocket Center just visiting exhibitions again, going on the Mars Rover and Space Shot ride (gulp! Weightlessness!) plus visiting the gift shop for about the 40th time!

Yesterday we completed the X-prise challenge; same thing as an Egg Drop, with criteria and budget to consider. Our crew trainer was dubious of the quality of our lunar lander design, but it worked perfectly! We also had a lunar rover which had to then roll as far as possible, all without damaging the egg. 

We were fortunate to hear a presentation from Homer Hickam, the author of "Rocket Boys" - which has been made into the movie "October Sky". He is also an engineer who has designed rockets and trained astronauts. We even have signed copies of the book!

Finally we had our graduation and celebration dinner.  It was just incredible to walk into the Davidson Center for Space Exploration after it was closed to the public and enjoy the company of our fellow graduates and trainers sitting under that massive Saturn V rocket! There was an amazing ambience as the sunlight disappeared and the museum lights came on. The band that played for us to dance to was fabulous...sort of a shame to have to leave and go pack!

So my time in Alabama is at an end...for now; maybe I could think about doing the Advanced Space Camp??

With all the different forms of communication available, it is great that it doesn't feel as though there is no more. Team Tranquility will continue to stay in contact; there are way too many photos to ever forget my fabulous team mates! 

Once home, I will work to add photos that I haven't been able to during this week. Sometimes I have had to push myself at midnight to post to the blog, but I am feeling very glad that I did. It would be almost impossible to remember everything now!

Hopefully our flight out of Huntsville will be far less eventful than our flights (yes, it's a plural!) into Huntsville! Fingers crossed for 1. No broken panel on the leading edge of a wing that they hammer until it's irreparable, or 2. All engines continue working and we can land without a cavalcade of fire engines to meet and greet!

Most of all, I am looking forward to seeing Mark, Lucy and Jack again. It's been tough not to be able to have much contact at all, thanks to a very full schedule and awkward time difference. See you in about 25.5 hours!!

"Commander, this is Capcom. Your mission is complete and has been a success. Please return to your regular life and remember all the wonderful people you have met and things you have done. Over and out."

Day 4: Tuesday

Another busy day! 

I've extracted DNA from a strawberry and designed a mining facility on the Moon. NASA gave us a huge batch of resources and some very good information for classroom ideas.

We launched our rockets this afternoon: that was really spectacular! My rocket has to stay here because we used gunpowder to set it off and the residue isn't allowed back through customs. My crew trainer us going to hang onto it and launch it many more times instead.

We created Ablative Shields to protect a raw egg. The Ablative Shield protects capsules from burning up in re-entry. Same idea as the black tiles on a Space Shuttle.  We has to choose from a range of layers; things like cork, aluminum foil, cotton wool, paper, spack filler. The shield could only be 1cm thick and had to protect the egg from 3500degree (Fahrenheit) heat for 3 minutes. Somehow our egg survived uncooked and unexploded!

We completed our Orion Mission tonight. 2.5 hours of stressful situations throughout a launch and land to the Moon. In these missions there are always some scheduled "anomalies", but we ended up with a few real ones, technically! However, we battled on to complete the mission on time for splash down, despite the computer screens in a few positions going blank. Computer screens at Mission Control tend to be important!

Saturn V Replica: the real one is inside!