Travel: Summer Camp in Outer Space

Future scientists, engineers, and astronauts have broadened their horizons at the one and only Space Camp, in Huntsville, Alabama, for a quarter of a century. This June, the United States Space Camp celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary, and it invites anyone in America to attend the festivities.

At some point almost every American child dreams of becoming an astronaut. I was part of the generation that was smitten with the 1986 movie SpaceCamp, in which Joaquin Phoenix, Lea Thompson, and a team of teenage space campers accidentally go into orbit. No one has gotten that lucky at the real Space Camp, but almost 500,000 students and adults have graduated from it since it opened in 1982. It’s at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, in Huntsville, and it expects to welcome thousands of guests this summer during its anniversary season.

The Space and Rocket Center is an interactive indoor-outdoor museum run by the state of Alabama on land donated by the U.S. Army, and the camp has 3- and 6-day programs for children 9 to 11, 6- and 8-day ones for kids 12 to 14, and a 6- and 13-day ones for 15- to 18-year-olds. During those days, students train for and conduct two-hour space shuttle missions, go through Mars training, simulate interplanetary travel, build and launch their own rockets, and more.

On a recent Saturday, busloads of students arrived to begin a week of their high-tech training as visitors roamed the Rocket Park and the museum. Space Camp’s actual birthday is the week of June 9, but the celebration lasts all summer, with special events and activities including weekly appearances by astronauts and the unveiling of the Space Camp Hall of Fame, with William Shatner emceeing the induction banquet, as well as alumni programs, alumni parent-child programs, and weekly VIP receptions.

The special guests will include the astronauts Story Musgrave and Bob Springer; the real-life “Black Hawk Down” pilot Michael Durant; Cdr. Trish Beckman, the first female F-15 and F/A-18 crewmember; Maj. Jill Long, who has flown more than 50 Air Force combat missions; and Jamail Larkins, a Space Camp alumnus who at 23 is one of the world’s youngest aerobatics pilots and a goodwill ambassador for the Federal Aviation Administration.

Space Camp started out as the vision of the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who wanted to generate enthusiasm about math and science to foster future generations of rocket scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. As Al Whitaker, the media relations manager at the Space and Rocket Center, puts it, “Space Camp exists to inspire youngsters to take additional math and science courses while in school so they’ll one day have the option of a high-tech career. Through our doors pass America’s next generation of scientists, engineers and maybe even astronauts.”

While there for this summer’s anniversary events, you can seek inspiration yourself from the place’s museum exhibits. “The USSRC museum provides the opportunity to see and experience the whole history of the manned space flight program,” Whitaker says. “From an actual V-2 rocket to the actual Apollo Command Module that carried men to the moon, the Center has amassed one of the world’s largest collections of space artifacts.”

Climb a cliff face on a Martian volcano with the museum’s Mars Climbing Wall, or take a virtual journey across Martian terrain with the Mars Mission attraction. Land the shuttle yourself, using a hands-on simulator, or experience blastoff on the rides Space Shot and G Force Accelerator. Watch Tom Hanks’s Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon or Walt Disney’s Roving Mars in the IMAX theater.

In Rocket Park, which the senator and astronaut John Glenn has called “the finest rocket collection in the world,” take an up-close look at a variety of NASA and military rockets. Finally, gaze up at the towering space shuttle. The Space and Rocket Center is the only place in the world where you can get up close to a “full stack”—the space shuttle orbiter, external tank, and two solid rocket boosters, 184 feet high in all.

When Space Camp graduates its half-millionth trainee this summer, Whitaker says, “We’ll pause to reflect on that for a moment, then set about the task of working with the next half million trainees, including students, adults, and teachers.” In July a refurbished Saturn V rocket will be rolled into place, and in November a new Saturn V visitor center will open. After that, as NASA prepares to retire its shuttle fleet, the Space and Rocket Center plans to put one of the orbiters on permanent display in a new facility that, Whitaker promises, will be “as unique as the space shuttle itself.”

—Nancy Mann Jackson is a freelance writer in Alabama who writes frequently about travel, business, and Americana.