WE HAVE LIFT-OFF: AMERICAN NASA TRIP
Congratulations to Charles Smith (4B) and Andrew Lawson (4A) who won places on a fantastic October Half Term trip to Houston, Texas and Titusville, Florida. Along with 17 other pupils from across the UK, they visited the Johnson Space Centre (with its Neutral Bouyancy Laboratory), the Houston Museum of Natural Science, the Kennedy Space Centre, the Merritt Island National Wildlife Range and Seaworld, Orlando.
In order to win the competition, run by ISSET, (International Space School Education Trust), the boys had to write an essay about a mission to Mars, describing who they would take and what the aims of the mission would be. Andrew Lawson tells us about this exhilarating trip:
‘At the NASA-Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas, we saw the famous mission control room and visited Rice University, where Kennedy once gave his famous speech about the space program. At the Houston Museum of Natural Science, we saw a planetarium show on Saturn and had the chance to do the ‘Challenger Mission’, a simulated flight to the moon, in which one group worked in mission control, while the other group operated the space shuttle.
At the Kennedy Space Centre, we learnt all about the International Space Station and what had gone wrong with Columbia. We saw the launch pads and some real space shuttles! One of my favourite parts of the trip was in the Astronaut Hall of Fame, where there was a chance to try some of the astronaut training equipment, including moon-walking in harnesses, the centrifuge (the infamous g-force simulator, which spins you round incredibly fast!), the microgravity ladder and the multi access trainer. On the last two days of this trip-of-a-lifetime, we visited a wildlife reserve and Sea World, where we saw exotic creatures such as manatees and alligators.
Almost every night, NASA astronauts and space engineers gave us talks about such things as solar sails, the life of an astronaut and the future of space exploration. It was an amazing trip and Charles and me had great fun. We are really grateful to have learnt so much about space and to have met some fantastic people’.
By Andrew Lawson (4A)