Like much of the nation, Afifeh Alaween was very moved by John Glenn’s return to space last year. But the precocious North Bergen 13-year-old took her feelings a step further. She wanted to know what it was really like to experience space firsthand (or as close to firsthand as you could get on earth).
It was while she was working on a project last year for the Girl Scouts that she heard about a program called Space Camp in Alabama. She applied immediately.
“I thought it would be cool; it sounded really cool. So I applied for it,” Alaween said enthusiastically last month. The camp is a popular destination for kids worldwide who are interested in anything about space or being an astronaut. So much so, that last year the allotted spaces had already filled up, and she couldn’t get in. Even this year, it took all the luck she had just to secure the last open slot, but secure it she did.
Run by the Alabama Space and Exhibition Center, Space Camp is located in Huntsville, Ala. Flying in by herself on a multi-connecting flight, she was unprepared for all the kids who got on at Atlanta, also heading for Space Camp.
“We had the plane filled with kids, and from places like Scotland and Australia. It was amazing all of us kids on the plane all going to the same place,” Alaween said.
So what was camp life like?
“We had so much fun!” Alaween said. “It really was a blast. We were put into like a tube-like structure that was our dorm, which was made up to look like the living quarters in a real space station. We had six girls in our area, and the rest of our space team was nine boys. You operate as a team for your time at Space Camp.”
The camp is divided up into two missions over the five days of the camp. Usually there is a day of training before the mission, then there is the mission itself. Afterwards, it is critiqued.
On a mission
On her first mission, Alaween was assigned to be a space scientist. She had to test the effects of light on different materials.
But her second mission was a little different. She was assigned the role of flight director.
“That was a challenge because the counselors were always introducing lots of little problems to raise your blood pressure, and we were just like freaking out!” Alaween said breathlessly, as if she were still at the controls of a faltering ship. “And sometimes the fix to what they did wasn’t in the manual, so we ended up just pushing a lot of buttons! Wow. But, somehow it worked!”
What was it like commanding a group of 14 sometimes unruly kids? “We would fight a lot and we even got points taken off with some of the bad stuff some of the kids were doing,” Alaween said, “but when it came down to teamwork and the mission stuff, we were, like, working as a team. I was amazed!”
The points system is for an overall score that each team accumulates for such things as skill at controlling their craft and teamwork on the missions.
Another part of the week was devoted to training and simulations. The weightlessness simulator, like a ride at an amusement park, drops from a great height to simulate the weightless in space.
Alaween remembers it was scary the first time she was to go on it. “I said I didn’t want to go on this, no, but the counselors said you gotta, go so I went.”
She said the first drop was “very scary” but that it was also fast going up. She remembered that it went so fast that somehow it popped the band on her watch, which ended up on the floor when the simulation was over. Indeed, the literature for the camp states that the gravity simulator reaches 4 “G’s,” or four times the weight of gravity on earth.
If someone were to ask Alaween if she still wants to be an astronaut, she would reply “No,” emphatically. While the exuberant Horace Mann eighth grader likes traveling and collecting historical objects or “anything she gets fascinated with,” she is thinking about studying oceanography. “I like the ocean, but I’m not sure about the effects of gravity and all, so I am thinking about studying the oceans. I think that needs exploring also,” she said. What else did Alaween find disagreeable about the experience?
“The food was horrible!”
But isn’t food up in orbit is supposed to look like something concocted in a science lab?
“That would have been preferable to what we had,” Alaween said. “The food at Space Camp was truly horrible. Every night they served pizza that tasted like rubber. Try chewing on rubber, and that’s what it tasted like.”
For more information on Space Camp, the Internet address is: http://www.spacecamp.com.