Well me and my girlfriend hosted "International Space Day - Moon Mission Expedition One" for the kids on the block.
First we set up the garage like a mission control thing. With cardboard dividers and stuff, none of the "equipment" had to work, because we wouldn't be playing with that. More for ambiance. We had some old computers and scopes and stuff laying around. So it looked good. Then we went into the living room for pre-flight briefing and some flying lessons - like how airplanes work, and how the propeller pulls the plane through the air, and how the wings lift it into the sky. And how the pilot controls the controls.. We had the livingroom decorated, again, with cardboard and whiteboard and stuff like that.
We all flew a short airplane ride in our X-Plane simpit - To get from home to the spaceport. Once at the spaceport we had astronaut food from the planetarium for snacks and stuff. The frosting in the toothpaste tubes was a hit! We had a mission briefing and cartoons and breaktime. We then went downstairs to the Orbiter simpit. Now remember, we had the whole house plastered up with that white construction paper and posterboard. Decorated with important-looking Nasa emblems and plenty of classic space photos like the shuttle, and buzz lightyear and spacecamp. you know some real stuff, some kiddie stuff.
We had a 5 minute mission briefing and a few more minutes of instructional class. Like what we might find on the moon when we got there. And how to use the eva kits we handed out.
We flew a very simplified and time-compressed mock mission to the moon and upon arrival there we all got out of the ship and went to our basecamp. On the flight out every kid got to sit up front and roll the ship and see a view of the earth rapidly receding, and the moon looming ahead big-time. We had a bunch of MFD's going and borrowed some from the networked x-plane sim too, via iPads. I'm certain none of it was accurate, but it looked cool! I had to take the back panel off the simpit and "expand it" with plastic from the UPS store that was throwing out remodeling waste. We also built "space seats" from more hoolahoops and more tarps. Thus making it a transport ship instead of a two seater. We landed at base and crawled through the access tubes made again from hoolahoops and yard tarps. Cardboard Jetways and hallways are cool!! We had another "briefing" and then went outside to explore the surface. The yard was decorated all over with black garbage bags and tarps and sand and a still projection of the earth on a humongus white sheet painted black, just so. We did Saturn and a comet too, sure it was unreal, but the kiddies loved it!! We strung a few LED lights on impossibly thin wires to simulate some stars. Like throwies more or less. We had a real celestron set up in the back too, but the kids were more interested in riding around in their battery powered 4x4's like moonbuggies.
What a blast! We had given each kid an EVA-kit consisting of a camera, some pens and papers, a 6-page space-a-ship pilot's manual complete with a flight plan and log and orbital operations procedures, some silver painted zip-loc baggies and plastic sandbox shovels, and a GoldenGuide to Astronomy. We made sure it all fit in a good sized lunchbox. The cameras were "space administration" equipment on loan and had to be returned at the end of the mission.
We did a treasure hunt NASA style. We hid some "relics" from aliens on the mock lunar surface. Like an old calculator circuit board. A platter from a hard disk. Power module "batteries", a pc case. A few boxes with a flashing LED that could not be opened till they got back to the lab, some real moonrocks from the sauna that would break apart as soon as you dropped them. That sort of thing. And we made what looked like a derelict spacecraft, Just a triangled pre-fab house roof panel we pulled from the construction dumpster - made to look like winged spacecraft all buried. Just the wing sticking 2 meters out of the ground. That's all. But man did it seem real to the kids alright. The mission briefing made it seem like a real space-a-ship was buried!! I wired up my old black and white portable jvc tv set as a "scanner", I made a "screensaver" that would show an outline of the buried spacecraft with a pic microcontroller and dying laptop. You could turn the knob and it would show different wireframe drawings. Now that laptop's innards is serving as a digital picture frame of a sort. I got it wired to the big screen and it has a new wired ethernet cable to the home network. The scanner was big, and bulky and hard to carry, on purpose!
It was neat, the kids collected the stuff for later analysis. They took pictures of the relics like crime-scene investigators! And they "radioed back to base" when they found the equipment bay / pc case asking for help and transport digging it up. We had supper on the moonbase after eva.
We did much of the eva at evening with the sun going down, We camped out on the moon and made the return trip home the next day. We returned early in the morning before sun-rise. What a cool 1-night vacation!
And each kid got a certificate like you get when you go to NASA's website and put your name on those cd's that get bolted to a REAL space probe like the mars rovers.
Aside from the simpits, everything cost like $200.00 for supplies and paint and tape. Much of everything was built from stuff found in the neighborhood trash. And the eva kits were cheap. We had enough of last-year's pocket digital cameras to provide one for everybody. We wrapped them in black electrical tape hiding all the controls except for on/off and the shutter button. A space camera has to be simple and easy to use.
I figure, since we were getting an expansion and some remodeling done and weren't living there for the month, we might as well do something cool for a change. The mounds of dirt from the backhoe were absolutely thrilling for a lunar surface! Especially when painted grey. All this tape and fabric and plastic lent a spacey feeling to the whole set-up. It wasn't durable though. This was one-off fun day! But I wouldn't want to re-build the moon again in the back yard.
First we set up the garage like a mission control thing. With cardboard dividers and stuff, none of the "equipment" had to work, because we wouldn't be playing with that. More for ambiance. We had some old computers and scopes and stuff laying around. So it looked good. Then we went into the living room for pre-flight briefing and some flying lessons - like how airplanes work, and how the propeller pulls the plane through the air, and how the wings lift it into the sky. And how the pilot controls the controls.. We had the livingroom decorated, again, with cardboard and whiteboard and stuff like that.
We all flew a short airplane ride in our X-Plane simpit - To get from home to the spaceport. Once at the spaceport we had astronaut food from the planetarium for snacks and stuff. The frosting in the toothpaste tubes was a hit! We had a mission briefing and cartoons and breaktime. We then went downstairs to the Orbiter simpit. Now remember, we had the whole house plastered up with that white construction paper and posterboard. Decorated with important-looking Nasa emblems and plenty of classic space photos like the shuttle, and buzz lightyear and spacecamp. you know some real stuff, some kiddie stuff.
We had a 5 minute mission briefing and a few more minutes of instructional class. Like what we might find on the moon when we got there. And how to use the eva kits we handed out.
We flew a very simplified and time-compressed mock mission to the moon and upon arrival there we all got out of the ship and went to our basecamp. On the flight out every kid got to sit up front and roll the ship and see a view of the earth rapidly receding, and the moon looming ahead big-time. We had a bunch of MFD's going and borrowed some from the networked x-plane sim too, via iPads. I'm certain none of it was accurate, but it looked cool! I had to take the back panel off the simpit and "expand it" with plastic from the UPS store that was throwing out remodeling waste. We also built "space seats" from more hoolahoops and more tarps. Thus making it a transport ship instead of a two seater. We landed at base and crawled through the access tubes made again from hoolahoops and yard tarps. Cardboard Jetways and hallways are cool!! We had another "briefing" and then went outside to explore the surface. The yard was decorated all over with black garbage bags and tarps and sand and a still projection of the earth on a humongus white sheet painted black, just so. We did Saturn and a comet too, sure it was unreal, but the kiddies loved it!! We strung a few LED lights on impossibly thin wires to simulate some stars. Like throwies more or less. We had a real celestron set up in the back too, but the kids were more interested in riding around in their battery powered 4x4's like moonbuggies.
What a blast! We had given each kid an EVA-kit consisting of a camera, some pens and papers, a 6-page space-a-ship pilot's manual complete with a flight plan and log and orbital operations procedures, some silver painted zip-loc baggies and plastic sandbox shovels, and a GoldenGuide to Astronomy. We made sure it all fit in a good sized lunchbox. The cameras were "space administration" equipment on loan and had to be returned at the end of the mission.
We did a treasure hunt NASA style. We hid some "relics" from aliens on the mock lunar surface. Like an old calculator circuit board. A platter from a hard disk. Power module "batteries", a pc case. A few boxes with a flashing LED that could not be opened till they got back to the lab, some real moonrocks from the sauna that would break apart as soon as you dropped them. That sort of thing. And we made what looked like a derelict spacecraft, Just a triangled pre-fab house roof panel we pulled from the construction dumpster - made to look like winged spacecraft all buried. Just the wing sticking 2 meters out of the ground. That's all. But man did it seem real to the kids alright. The mission briefing made it seem like a real space-a-ship was buried!! I wired up my old black and white portable jvc tv set as a "scanner", I made a "screensaver" that would show an outline of the buried spacecraft with a pic microcontroller and dying laptop. You could turn the knob and it would show different wireframe drawings. Now that laptop's innards is serving as a digital picture frame of a sort. I got it wired to the big screen and it has a new wired ethernet cable to the home network. The scanner was big, and bulky and hard to carry, on purpose!
It was neat, the kids collected the stuff for later analysis. They took pictures of the relics like crime-scene investigators! And they "radioed back to base" when they found the equipment bay / pc case asking for help and transport digging it up. We had supper on the moonbase after eva.
We did much of the eva at evening with the sun going down, We camped out on the moon and made the return trip home the next day. We returned early in the morning before sun-rise. What a cool 1-night vacation!
And each kid got a certificate like you get when you go to NASA's website and put your name on those cd's that get bolted to a REAL space probe like the mars rovers.
Aside from the simpits, everything cost like $200.00 for supplies and paint and tape. Much of everything was built from stuff found in the neighborhood trash. And the eva kits were cheap. We had enough of last-year's pocket digital cameras to provide one for everybody. We wrapped them in black electrical tape hiding all the controls except for on/off and the shutter button. A space camera has to be simple and easy to use.
I figure, since we were getting an expansion and some remodeling done and weren't living there for the month, we might as well do something cool for a change. The mounds of dirt from the backhoe were absolutely thrilling for a lunar surface! Especially when painted grey. All this tape and fabric and plastic lent a spacey feeling to the whole set-up. It wasn't durable though. This was one-off fun day! But I wouldn't want to re-build the moon again in the back yard.
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yeah!!
