NASA’s adult space camp
If you’re fascinated by space travel, attending camp at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center “will send you into orbit,” said Jane Engle in the Los Angeles Times. The three-day adult academy I attended doesn’t coddle guests: We slept in dorm-like bunk beds at the Huntsville, Ala., facility (spacecamp.com), and we worked almost 12 hours a day as if we were training for a space mission. But we spent much of each day inside mock-ups of a space-shuttle cockpit, NASA mission control, or the International Space Station, taking turns at the various tasks a real space-shuttle crew would have to master. “The physical training was a highlight.” Like real astronauts, we each had to strap ourselves into a strange chair, rigged to the ceiling, that conveys what it’s like to operate in the low-gravity conditions of the moon. I’m “terrible at moonwalking,” I learned, but “it was so much fun that I couldn’t stop laughing.”
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