Day 7
Thursday
This morning we had one of the most difficult challenges presented to us this week so far. Payload lofting – using balloons to propel rocket parts up a string to team-mates above.
Red Team failed to learn from their mistakes and overloaded every rocket, costing them literally millions of dollars in damages. White Team, who went for the ‘speed is essential’ method of thinking, managed to blow up half the balloons in Houston in their haste to beat the other teams to the finish. In contrast, Silver Team’s ‘slow and steady wins the race attitude’ did well although they ran out of time in the end as they were just too slow.
Blue Team decided to create a monster payload lifting machine which had every single available balloon providing propulsion. However, this failed to launch and their similar second huge rocket was equally unsuccessful. Having said this, they valiantly pulled together in the end and managed to get most pieces up.
After this we were given a talk by Dr Richard Scheuring who is NASA’s Chief Flight Surgeon in Johnson Space Center. His presentation (which included the occasional picture of Scotland) was extremely interesting especially for the large contingent of students in the Scottish Space School who are interested in doing medicine at University. He talked about the effects of zero-gravity and lunar-gravity on the human body which ranges from light motion sickness to radiation poisoning and bone decay.
He also discussed the future plans for NASA, named the Constellation Programme, which involve going to the moon and then onto Mars. Although his presentation was fantastic, we were disappointed when he told us that haggis is not allowed into America and the canned variety is rather unsavoury!
Next, after the talk, we built our rockets. The designs varied from team to team. The Silver Team (in a very unimaginative and unoriginal fashion) bought 12 of their 13 parts from a pre-built Estes rocket, which was most definitely frowned upon by the students who ‘home-made’ their rockets as much as possible. The most noticeable rocket however was the unique design from the Blue Team who used a toilet tube, half a plastic egg, a lot of duct tape and a high-powered model rocket engine – which we cannot wait to see launched!
That evening after dinner, we met Gene Kranz who was the Flight Director for many of the Apollo missions including Apollo 11 (he talked Neil Armstrong down to the moon) and Apollo 13 (imortalised by the film of the same name). His presentation was delivered in the old Apollo Mission Control room. His truly awe-inspiring talk included the whole inside story of the Apollo 13 mission and also lots about motivation and determination, which blew us away.
After this breath-taking talk we sat down and watched the movie ‘Apollo 13’ in the actual mission control featured in the film.
Absolutely brilliant!!
By Patrick Olden and Anders Convery.
