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Issue 51 – October 2014 – QUEEN MARGARET CALLING
We Have Lift Off
S
t
udents from 11 different countries, namely Australia, Turkey,
Norway, Germany, Bangladesh, the USA, Austria, Latvia,
Greece, Belgium and New Zealand, participated in the week
long programme.
Throughout the week we were engaged in a number of
engineering challenges including building a rocket that was safe
enough for an egg to be shot up into the air and come down for
a soft landing. Also we built a filter to simulate those used in the
international space station, a space suit to protect an apple from the
elements and a heat shield.
There were team building activities based outdoors such as
escaping from a simulated helicopter crash, low rope courses where
some people had been blindfolded and rock climbing.
The programme included lectures from people who had close
connections to US space programmes such as members of mission
control, aeronautical engineers and real astronauts Bob Springer and
DonThomas who both went to space during the shuttle programme
in the 1980s and 1990s. They talked about what it was like to be up
in space and just how special the experience is. Don Thomas talked
about how difficult it was to become an astronaut as, out of around
8000 applicants, NASA only accepts eight people every two or three
After watching a movie about the Apollo pro-
gramme in Year 10 a spark for space explora-
tion was lit within Laura-Jane Douch. Initially
too young to apply for the NASA Space Camp
she waited a couple of years, then applied for a
Royal Society of New Zealand Scholarship. A
successful application saw Laura-Jane attend-
ing the 24th annual International Space Camp
in Huntsville. She shares the highlights of her
experience:
years. DonThomas applied 15 times before he was actually accepted.
The main objective of the week was to develop a feeling of what
it is like to train to be an astronaut. This was done by experiencing a
number of different simulators including the centrifuge which spun
around so fast that you felt four times the earth’s gravity pushing
down on you, the space shot which was 3gs, the 1/6 gravity chair
which simulated walking on the moon as you only felt a sixth of
your weight and the multi axis trainer which simulates what it is like
to re-enter into the earth’s atmosphere.
A highlight was scuba diving. This is a technique called equal
balancing which real astronauts use to simulate zero gravity. You are
able to float in an almost zero gravity environment at the bottom of
a 40 foot deep tank, and even played basketball with a bowling ball.
Over the course of the week the missions completed included
a simulation of launching a shuttle out of the atmosphere,
rendezvousing and docking at the International Space Station or the
ISS and then re-entering and landing the shuttle. The different roles
we could play were a pilot flying the shuttle, an engineer carrying
out experiments in the space station, a mission specialist who wore
an astronaut suit and went out and fixed the ISS, or a member of
mission control. In order to make these missions as realistic as
possible they included injuries and accidents that we had to try and
fix.
The whole week led up to one three hour mission, in which I was
a mission specialist in the astronaut suit fixing a satellite and a flight
engineer carrying out experiments in the ISS.
It was an experience of a lifetime and I would encourage other
Queen Margaret College student to apply in future.
