The HabForum

Photos will be coming, but for now I thought you would want to hear about the Orion Lunar mission from the 4-day adult camp. The sims are all very new and so is the SOCR which is what they call the lunar mission control. There are 8 mission specialists and a pilot and commander as well as the SOCR crew. I was Lunar Mission Specialist 5, so I can't tell you much about SOCR, but it looked very sharp and I took a photo. 4 of the Lunar mission specialists begin the sim at the Moon Base, Rising Star. The other 4 (we only had 3) start in Orion with the Pilot and the Commander. They assist, as needed with the launch procedures and then they enter Altair, the Lunar lander, and power it up before returning to Orion. After Lunar Orbit is achieved, they enter the Altair again, separate and land on the moon. They then do an eva over to the Rising Star (no suits for this part). The 4 LMS's who started on the moon have done their missions, which include a repair on a new solar array which is done in 1/6 gravity sims and in suits. 2 work on this and the other 2 moon walk in suits to do some repairs on the outside of Rising Star. After the crew swap, they return to Earth on the Orion. The 3 of us who had arrived at the station suited up and did repairs on a damaged module of the moon base which is called Aurora. Aurora had a broken window which had to be replaced and some fried electrical circuits which had to be replaced in order to power it up again and pressurize it for future habitation. The mission took 2 hours and we also had 2 one-hour shuttle missions and a 3-hour EDM. All three used the Enterprise with its MOCR and the ISS. Many, many photos will be coming soon.

Can't wait to see more.
How many people were in your session total?

There were 13 people on Team Challenger and a great Crew Trainer Sam Tanenbaum. It was one of those special teams that bonded well with each other and with our Crew Trainer. Sam is the best. We all agreed to keep in touch and are sharing all of our photos. We were the only adult team there, so we won all of the awards!
One of our team has access to a computer embroidering machine and she took the scan of our patch to make them for all of us. I drew it with much input from the rest and we all think it was a winner, even if it had no competition. My mother had asked me if any of my old Space Camp friends would be there and I told her I didn't think so but that a lot of my new Space Camp friends would be. And I was right!

Conan wrote:We were the only adult team there, so we won all of the awards!

Just 13 in your camp? Interesting as USSRC showed the registration as full.. I was told that the October camp has 32 slots.

Looking forward to seeing your patch, Conan!

Hotdog wrote:Looking forward to seeing your patch, Conan!

Same here!

majtom7 wrote:Just 13 in your camp? Interesting as USSRC showed the registration as full.

When did you check? At least two weeks out from a camp it is 'closed' and shows as full.

street wrote:

majtom7 wrote:Just 13 in your camp? Interesting as USSRC showed the registration as full.

When did you check? At least two weeks out from a camp it is 'closed' and shows as full.

So, just 13 people was considered as full from the start?

street wrote:When did you check? At least two weeks out from a camp it is 'closed' and shows as full.

I check daily during the week.

Thank you for that bit of information. So that's why the camp showed as full on 7/25. If they were planning for only 16 and one team, then it would also make sense that the website showed 3 open slots at 6/24.

majtom7 wrote:So that's why the camp showed as full on 7/25. If they were planning for only 16 and one team, then it would also make sense that the website showed 3 open slots at 6/24.

Correct. Weeks/sessions/programs are closed out a couple of weeks in advance to allow P&L to get schedules and rosters set up for the week. There are occasional last minute additions and deletions, but when we're sitting at 13 and we're two weeks out the session is closed so we don't get last minute additions that would all of a sudden push us to an additional team, which would wreck chaos with schedules (especially for simulators and on the mission floor).

So did the mission still have the two minutes in real time, 4 people tunnel crawl from capsule to lander, power up lander, then tunnel crawl back?

majtom7 wrote:So did the mission still have the two minutes in real time, 4 people tunnel crawl from capsule to lander, power up lander, then tunnel crawl back?

And random time warps that skipped over the time stamp required for certain checklists?

Asking a serious note on behalf of PK and Deadly Duck -- Can you now manually dock the Orion and Altair, or is it still automatic? (A glitch caused a time warp which skipped over the manual docking when we are there last.)

There were random time warps, but we did crawl into the lander and power it up and then crawled back into the command module to wait to separate and land. There were some software glitches, but they haven't used this simulation much yet. I don't know if we were the first, but we were among the first. We crawled back through the tube when it was time to land. Closed the hatch and did the separation procedure to land on the moon. They didn't actually have us suit up to walk across the moon to the moon base. We only suited up to leave the moon base to go to the damaged base and effect repairs.

One of my Challenger teammates just sent his photo of our patch. They only gave us one print and we gave it to a teammate who is going to get the patches made up.
[img]https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid ... b696b9/img] It has the moon, to represent our mission to the moon. We put 13 craters on the moon to represent the 13 members of the team and roughly in the shape of the constellation Orion, to represent our craft, which is also on the patch. There is also a commemoration of the 7 Challenger astronauts who perished. And the names of the 13 team members are around the outer band of the patch. We had three team members named John. Hence the John cubed.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid ... bca0b696b9

Nice job on the patch design. The stark colors remind me of the Apollo 12 patch in a way. My first impulse would be to have the Orion vehicle eclipsing a blue Earth, just to spice it up a bit...
Great idea cubing the "John" to save space! I was once on a team with 19 kids, and we had two or three Mikes. This would have been a handy solution!

Conan wrote:There were random time warps, but we did crawl into the lander and power it up and then crawled back into the command module to wait to separate and land. There were some software glitches, but they haven't used this simulation much yet. I don't know if we were the first, but we were among the first.

Thank you for the information.

Au contraire... USSRC has been running the Orion sim for at least three years, maybe longer. My understanding is that the problems were detailed two years ago and I know that we pointed them out again last year. It sounds like nothing has been fixed.

I hope that we do all Shuttle in October. I am paying for a finished product, not a beta test that I know is buggy.

Adding lemons to my packing list...

I'd heard rumors that the Orion sim wasn't working all that well. At least now I know what the problems seem to be. I, too, hope to be focused on the STS for the majority of the time I'm there this Fall.

Hotdog wrote:Great idea cubing the "John" to save space! I was once on a team with 19 kids, and we had two or three Mikes. This would have been a handy solution!

My first mission patch, I did the last names on the actual embroidered version and used 'squared' symbols for the married couples.

I believe that what I view as bugs, the USSRC views as nominal. That's why nothing gets changed.