Okay, here's my official report:
In October, I attended the week-long Advanced Adult Space Camp, with astronauts Bob Springer and "Hoot" Gibson! Bob was around off-and-on, but Hoot was around pretty much all the time.
As this was a week long event, there were simply too many things to report on. This time, I'm only going to hit the highlights...
To start with, I arrived the evening before camp, after a long drive from Chattanooga (where I rode a passenger train pulled by steam, another hobby of mine). When I pulled up to the Center the next morning, I re-created the first scene in the 1986, "Spacecamp" movie showing the Space Camp facility, complete with Eric Clapton blaring from my MP3 player. Click below for the video of that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWyNmxgS2Uk
When we all checked in to Camp and introduced ourselves to one another, we found there was only one team this time. No competition!
Oh well, that meant we had Hoot all to ourselves. He was available most of the time, and of course we took advantage of that by asking him countless questions. He treated us like equals, something I was truly impressed with. Now I know for sure why NASA made him their chief astronaut for several years!
Bob Springer made himself available when he could. A real class act!
Hoot indulged my good friend John and I in a classic "Right Stuff" style pose in front of Pathfinder... John and I both wished our pal Steve could have been there.
Amazingly, we encountered
three astronauts one afternoon, including General Robert Stewart, the first Army astronaut! I'd always wanted to meet him and had no idea he lived nearby!
Note that Bob, on the right in the above shot, is holding his original issued NASA jacket. I drooled over it while I took some shots, of course!
I got a PLT slot on the Enterprise simulator (no Orion capsule stuff this time). Sadly, my CDR wasn't the greatest stick-and-rudder person who ever lived. She did a valiant job trying to keep the HUD lined up but eventually steered beyond it's tracking. By then, neither of us had a clue where we were (and CAPCOM didn't help). We pancaked into the swamps about a mile from runway 33 at Kennedy. She was given the call-sign, "Swamp Fox" for that. Even though she seemed to beat herself up over it for a while, she took it in stride. She eventually won the "Right Stuff Award," which I wholly agreed with.
Model rockets... We did the "launch an egg" thing again, and hilarity ensued. Our rocket decided to go into "RPG Mode". It went across the field, tearing itself apart on impact. the egg didn't fare well. Now I'm
sure I'll be called before the International Court for weaponizing rockets with biological weapons!
Each night, Hoot would hold court at "The Library," which is what we called the bar at the Marriott next to Space Camp (if the bar has a real name, I have no idea what it is). Here we see Hoot and John laughing at something that was just said. I think this was the evening when the 6' 4" blonde teacher from England came strolling in and wound up sitting next to me (I was a good boy, talking about my loving wife back home, something that I think baffled some of the others there that night). Note the shirt Hoot is wearing, it was worn on one of his shuttle missions.
The Redstone/Marshall tour went well. We even got to hit the NASA employee store! We all bought a lot of stuff. Even Hoot plunked down a sizeable chunk of change!
At Aviation Challenge, Hoot briefed us before we mounted the Mach 3 F-18 sims. I'd never used them before and we had a blast.
Yes, I gave better than I got. I got into 2 flat spins, but managed to smoke 5 of my team by shooting them down. I'm glad Hoot or Bob didn't hop into a cockpit as they'd have made colanders out of the rest of our planes!
My only problem was I had bad sinus problems (which prevented me from SCUBA diving the day before) and I felt terrible after being spun in the centrifuge. I'd done it plenty of times before with no problems, but I felt awful the rest of the day. I bowed out on the climbing wall, went to bed really early and slept like a rock. I felt fine the next day.
This shows a typical morning between breakfast and our first activity of the day. Hoot always took meals with us and was very receptive to questions. Where he got his stamina after closing out the bar at the Marriott almost every night, I'll never know. I couldn't keep up with him and he's got over 20 years on me!
Then, the Long Duration Mission on the next to last day...
Here's where I'm going to vent. You were warned.
The trainers told us to figure out among ourselves who got what position. I said I wanted CDR for the orbiter but only if nobody else wanted it. Well, we had a guy who'd had the CDR slot on the mission before that and he felt that entitled him to do it again. I'd missed out on cockpit time on the LDM several times and by God, I didn't want to give that up to the guy who'd just done the exact same thing the day before. My pal John pointed out I hadn't had a shot at the stick and the other guy just had, but there was a lot of staring at the floor. It made everyone very uncomfortable. I must admit that I didn't want to back down. I even agreed to flipping for it, but one of the trainers suggested we swap off being CDR (I'd get the descent portion). Later, the other guy admitted he went through all that for no reason other than he didn't want to me in mission control. I was less than impressed.
Once we went through some stick time for practice the day before, he admitted he was okay with me as CDR the whole time, (I was thinking sarcastically, "Wow, that's mighty magnanimous of you..." but didn't say it) just so he didn't have to spend 12+ hours in Mission Control. This guy had been to Space Camp 10 times and one of the trainers told me later he'd recalled this guy doing the exact same thing to another team. By then, I really was unimpressed. I overheard him the men's room the night before, griping with someone that he was saddled with "another new guy" this time in the cockpit. My opinion of the whole deal kept lowering by the minute.
As I waited for my PLT to catch up with the switches, the trainers halted the countdown, saying we lost an engine. So, we all had to walk out to a real SSME under Pathfinder, remove the paper sign, and "Carry" it to the orbiter. The PLT isn't here. I won't go into why.
So, here I am waiting for my right-seater to catch up again. he did
okay (better than I had my first time doing that), but for a guy who claimed to know everything and had apparently done this almost a dozen times, I was impressed even less.
SO, the mission went okay for the most part (though MOCR gave us bad burn data and we went through the ISS). MOCR folks were forced to attend a fake 'funeral' after causing us to destroy the orbiter. Frankly, I didn't find it very funny. I've been to military funerals. It was a little offensive to me, but I didn't want to say anything at the time.
When it came time for a EVA (spacewalk) I told the PLT that this was the price of admission.
We hung out in the ISS and trainers simply hit us with a comical level of errors, anomalies and so forth. I'd never done a LDM before and frankly, it got silly after a while. A couple on our team was fed up with it by the end. I can't say I blamed them.
But what really put a damper on an otherwise great week was my landing. One of our trainers hit my with high-level turbulence. I didn't even know they could program than into the sims. My PLT didn't believe I was experiencing this, even though the trainer admitted over the radio he'd hit us with it.
I think I was doing a good job staying on course and had the field in sight. At that point, the pilot has but ONE job; to get the gear down.
Guess what happened?
My "experienced" PLT who previously complained that he was 'stuck' with a first-timer, panicked. I was yelling for him to push the center green button, while pulling back on the stick, trying to salvage the landing by keeping the bottom of the orbiter clear before the gear locked. He never even hit the button.
Just two buttons. He couldn't even get that right. I pancaked at the end of runway 33 at KSC. I made the landing in the right place, but not in the right configuration.
With Hoot Gibson watching, no less.
I was livid.
Heck,
I still am.
Hoot texted me this shot of where we wound up at the end of the mission.
That night, my PLT made a comment that pretty much proved what I'd suspected at the time; he'd screwed up the entire mission on purpose. If he didn't have other issues I won't go into here, I might have drug him out back of the HAB and given him an attitude adjustment he'd never have forgotten. When John found out about this, he was probably even more angry than I was.
At Beer Call at the Marriott (if that bar has a name, I have no idea what it is), one of the team (Mike, I think) came up with my call sign. I'd never had one before, and Hoot agreed it was a good one. So, now at Space Camp, I'm now:
Skidmark
I made a point to tell this to the trainers the next morning only because I did NOT want this guy winning the Right Stuff award (again, this guy had other issues, let's just say). In fact, John and I agreed that if he'd won it after all that, we were just going to walk away from graduation after tossing our wings on the ground.
Beats me why, but I had to include this shot of my bag in the CDR's drawer on the mid deck...
The final morning at the HAB. Always a sad time, but after a week, I was actually looking forward to a good hotel room that night (after a very long drive to Mobile).
Getting my wings from Hoot (thanks to my pal Steve who showed up for the graduation). My pal John is to my left. Graduation was abbreviated compared to times past. There was no other team, so there was no competition with anyone else. I would have liked to have gone 4-0 in mission patch design, but oh well. I didn't shake hands with the PLT from the LDM. I didn't even want to look him in the eye.
The patches I got from Camp. Upper left is the pre-made mission patch that a few of us got. The right one is the outstanding team patch. No award was made for our mission patch. The lower is one I bought at the MSFC gift shop...
And here's the mission patch I drew. I knocked this out after I realized I wouldn't be able to dive in the SCUBA tank without feeling like my head was going to implode. I think the team liked it.