Day 5
Tuesday
Today in Silvermoon, our training room, we made our first presentations – the Silver team’s presentation on Mars Rovers entitled ‘MARStermind’ and the Blue team’s on Reflective Spectrometers. Very riveting stuff. This was followed by a fascinating presentation by astronaut Piers Sellers in the Blast Off room. He described in great detail the shuttle’s journey to the space station from launch to docking with great use of inflatable props!
After the talk we became VIPs and travelled to the Sonny Carter Training Facility where we saw the Neutral Buoyancy Lab (NBL). For those of you who don’t know what this is, it is basically a really large and deep swimming pool where astronauts train. Very cool. We then went to the Mock Up facility which contains a replica of the International Space Station. It was surprising at how small some of the modules in the ISS actually were.
After lunch we went to Mission Control and were privileged to watch them working on a flight simulation exercise. We then got to visit the historic Mission Control from where the Apollo missions were managed. As VIPs we got to go into the room and sit in the flight director’s chair, where Gene Kranz once sat. Lastly, we went to the Rocket Park and saw the Saturn V rocket. It was massive!!!
In the evening we went to a formal dinner at Villa Capri with the British Consul General. We had a chance to speak to both him and the many astronauts and engineers while enjoying a very tasty meal.
We went back to the hotel to prepare for another busy day.
Lauren Stewart, Kim Todd and Gwen Andoh-Kesson
