Haddonfield residents and grade-schoolers Talia Seshasai and Abigail Frey teamed up last month to tackle the whimsy and wonder of Space Camp at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala.
The weeklong educational program promotes science, technology, engineering and math, while training students and with hands-on activities and missions based on teamwork, leadership and problem solving. Space Camp operates year-round, and uses various astronaut training techniques to engage camp attendees in real-world applications of STEM subjects.
Talia and Abigail spent the week, both on the same team and separately, training with a team that flew a simulated space mission to the International Space Station, the moon or Mars. Both were first-timers in the camp geared toward 9- to 11-year-olds, who are allowed to attend without family members.
When The Sun caught up with the pair at the Seshasais’ home on Aug. 14, Talia showed off her specially-made jumper, while both Talia and Abigail proudly pointed to their names on a patch sewn onto the outfit commemorating their work with the group “Aries.”
“When I was 7, my dad told me about Space Camp, but then I was only allowed to go to the family camp, so that’s when I started going. My favorite thing all three years, was doing the missions. Some people were in the shuttle and some were working at Mission Control. I did the ones where you go to the ISS and the moon,” Talia related.
Said Abigail about the nature of the camp, “You’re in a group, and there are 16 people in each. There were seven girls and nine boys. All the girls were together in one bunking area and the boys were split up because it was seven people per room.”
As Talia further explained, each group faces different challenges throughout camp, working with their group to complete them, while other times campers are divided into smaller groups to perform certain tasks. There’s also always one speaker who is a current or former astronaut, and sometimes there’s an activity that goes with the theme of the speech.
The speaker during the girls’ tenure at camp was Capt. Wendy Lawrence, who was the first female graduate of United States Naval Academy to fly in space and eventually served on four shuttle missions before retiring from NASA in 2006.
“There’s a water challenge where they split up our big group (Aries) into groups of eight and eight. We had to assemble a cube underwater after all the parts were taken apart and thrown in. And then you had to find the pieces and assemble them, and you had 10 minutes to put it all back together,” Abigail revealed.
“The second one was where they took (the cube) apart again and you had to assemble it underwater, except this time, people in the group had different disabilities. Some in the group couldn’t see, some couldn’t use an arm or leg, some people weren’t allowed to talk.”
Along with teamwork, campers are also given lessons – intended or unintended – on patience and persistence, as Talia revealed with the cube exercise.
“We both completed the first challenge and then came really close to completing the second one. But during the second challenge, we were bringing the cube out of the water and back up to land, but it broke and we had to build it all over again.”
Campers are kept focused throughout the week, but Abigail explained there is enough time to explore the complex for places like the museum, shuttle park or the rides in Rocket Park – G-Force Accelerator and the Moonshot.
“There’s different simulators, too, like the multi-axis trainer. It’s supposed to simulate a ‘tumble spin’ which is when you’re completely out of control in different directions at once. There’s also the one-sixth chair, which simulates the moon having one-sixth the gravity of Earth,” she said.
Other highlights of camp witnessed by Seshasai and Frey were meeting an engineer who worked on the Apollo 11 moon mission, participating in post-dinner trivia contests and scavenger hunts, as well as presentations on exoplanets, periscopes and parachutes.
More than 900,000 trainees have graduated from a Space Camp program since its inception in 1982, including multiple astronauts from NASA and the European Space Agency.
For more information or to register for camp, interested parties can call (800) 637-7223 or visit: https://spacecamp.com/space/camp.
