At the US Space and Rocket Center’s monthly Adult Space Academy, guests spend a weekend immersed in the art of astronauting, including hands-on experiments and role-playing missions. A spot will set you back $800.
Jonathan Thompson spent a daring weekend experiencing what it is like to be an astronaut
Houston, we have multiple problems. There’s an ammonia leak on the shuttle that could kill us all, if the headlong collision course with Earth doesn’t first. Oh yes, and we’ve just left two astronauts floating in orbit.
Our first Space Camp mission had not gone well. We — the crew of misfits in flight suits and headsets — somehow managed to survive, via a daring crash-landing into a Florida swamp. But we’d still killed two spacewalkers, caused millions of dollars in damage and written off a space shuttle. This Nasa lark was harder than it looked.
Space Camp, as the name suggests, is a weekend-long retreat where guests are immersed in the art of astronauting. Based at the US Space and Rocket Center near Nasa’s headquarters in Huntsville, Alabama, it’s historically been targeted at teenagers, but of late the doors have been opened to adults too. With the 50th anniversary of the moon landings in the news, I decided to take the giant leap and sign up myself.
Space Camp is tough. I arrived expecting to be faced with simple challenges, but they were never less than demanding — and in some cases downright fiendish. On our first, catastrophically flawed “mission”, we ended up desperately pawing through manuals, seeking solutions to the warning lights flashing on the simulator as we nosedived towards destruction. As the shuttle spun out of control, the wail of despair from our “mission commander” reverberated through our
headsets. In Space Camp, everyone can hear you scream. Space Camp is equal parts science camp. Or to put it another way, it’s not all “bouncing around shooting lasers”, as one of my friends suggested beforehand.
After an opening briefing in Space Camp’s mess hall, my team of 12 — ranging from late 20s to early 40s, and a mix of men and women — was taken over to the Astrotrek lab, where we each rode the 1/6th Gravity Chair, designed to simulate lunar conditions.
We careened across a hangar-like room on the spring-loaded seat, taking gargantuan leaps before floating back down to the replica moon surface below.
The weekend progressed through a series of hands-on experiments and role-playing missions, all of which were in equal parts fascinating and challenging — and all decidedly more Buzz Aldrin than Buzz Lightyear.
We did better on our second mission. This time, I was one of two spacewalkers tasked with fixing a problem outside the International Space Station (ISS). It felt both tense and realistic, pulling on a heavy space suit inside the replica ISS, before getting into a roped harness and “floating” outside the airlock.
I was very pleased with my contribution, working in a pair to locate and remove empty supply tanks, before securing replacements, then safely returning. Very pleased, that is, until it was pointed out that my space boots were on the wrong feet and my suit wasn’t sealed properly.
We were housed in purpose-built dormitories called “Habitats”, which look like humungous toilet rolls, piled atop each other beneath the lifesize Saturn V rocket (there’s an option to stay at a Marriott, which two men in my team took up). Inside the Habitats, we each had a basic room, sleeping in bunks with a shared bathroom.
The missions and experiments continued until graduation on Sunday lunchtime. We built and fired our own rockets to test the principles of thrust; we practised first aid in low gravity and were spun around by the “multi-axis trainer” — a ball-like machine that replicates the disorientation of a tumble spin during reentry. Thankfully, all of us managed to hold on to our breakfasts, although one of the “Marriott Two” did look Martian around the gills.
The only time we got competitive was when we were split into two teams, and charged with building rival heatshields to protect eggs from a blowtorch. It quickly became about beating the other group, as we created our prototypes from a selection of materials. Sadly, our effort lasted 90 seconds before the “eggstronaut” was burnt and blackened.
By Sunday afternoon, it was odd to step off campus and come back down to Earth. It felt like we’d been at Space Camp for a week, taking on board an incredible amount of information. As an experience, this is just as rewarding for an adult as one imagines it is for the American high schoolers who flock here. As one of our trainers quipped: “It isn’t hard: all you have to do is put some space in your diary.”