ADULT SPACE CAMP

This is a space shuttle model situated in the rocket park at the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The photo was taken by me in October 2005, Michael Fallows. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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.”