Greetings from Alabama,

We arise to a beautiful spring day, cool but still and sunny, with the
prospect of significant warmth. Although there are lots of fun times for
the kids here (James Alderston is having a ball! "Can I come back in 2012
sir?") there are difficult aspects too.

The major problem for many is the lack of sleep and general tiredness. On
the first night in the habitat the girls had to contend with arctic air
conditioning and shivered through the night, Laura V wished she had
brought her thermals. They changed the air con for them last night and
they were warmer but Dave M and I now received the cold. I had to put my
socks and jumper on at 1am. Regardless of the temperature in the habitat
some of the group just have difficulty sleeping anyway ... general time
zone problem. Alex N had his head on the table at breakfast and Laura M
has just gone back 'for a nap' after breakfast.
Being in the habitat is intended to be like being on a space station, and
it certainly feels that way at times. No windows, a functional metallic
feel to stairways and halls, a general background rumble of hidden
machinery, interspersed by the arrival and departure of hundreds of kids.

Another problem that we tried to for-warn them about is the military style
organisation of the whole place ... something that Ben and Alex C have
found a little frustrating. At the low ropes course for example, they put
the planks back 30cm away from the required position and were reprimanded
for this. They cannot go anywhere unsupervised, and as Ben said, there is
a lot of waiting time. We pointed out that this is the nature of such a
structure environment and that space exploration requires an great deal of
patience and control. Astronauts train for 2 years for a 10 day mission.
As an aside I was talking to one of the employees here and she commented
that although she had great respect for the office of the commander in
chief (I wondered wher she was going here) she just couldn't respect
Barrack Obama. She told her husband that he should not have voted for him,
and apparently he replied. "You're right honey, I wish I hadn't". It's not
just our kids that have trouble being in a 'military' system.

But there are plenty of highs, and Jonathan and Adam were buzzing at
10.10pm last night when I met them cleaning their teeth. They had been in
the F 18 flight simulators down at the Aviation Challenge site. Here they
have about a dozen full sized cockpit simulators so pilots can fly sorties
and have aerial combat ... Adam reckoned he'd shot Jono! While the pilots
did that from Von T, Stephen did his scuba dive, which was totally
awesome. He got down to the bottom of the 7m tank, did some construction
work, played with an underwater basketball and more!

Ben rates the highlight so far, as being on the shuttle robotic arm as
mission specialist. James and Stephen have also raved about this. If you
get the chance to see "The Dream is Alive", a short film about one of the
first shuttle missions you will get an idea of what they are training to
do in their EDM (Extended Duration Mission) ... I'm pretty sure we have it
in the school library if anyone wants to get it out ... ask Bob Tuaine to
get it out for you. They have to fly the shuttle into space, catch a
satellite and fix it on a space walk, then land safely. Apparently Gareth
and Tim Z have landed the shuttle well, while Jasmine did some kind of
loop and nose dived into the ground!

Another great activity I watched yesterday was the ablative shield
challenge. Here they were given a selection of different materials and
asked to create a heat shield that would protect an egg from a blow torch
at a distance of 2cm. Sam, Caitlin and Yin Zhou had a very serious
discussion about what would be the best materials, and how to use their
'budget' most effectively. They settled on aluminium foil over several
layers of cork, bonded with an American polyfiller called 'Speckle'....
and it worked! After 3 minutes of flaming the egg was unscathed, much to
their satisfaction. Paulina, Bojana and Tara were doing the same thing and
also succeeded, although they were so tired at 7pm they couldn't tell me
what theirs was made of. Paulina was trying to rest her head on the others
shoulders while standing up. Meanwhile the big harvest moon was rising
over the Alabama trees ... beautiful.

Well, we teachers are off into Huntsville today, while the kids carry on
with their intensive programme. Will be back to see more of them scuba
this evening.

All the best,

David