Movies from Tuesday!

Wow! Yesterday was quite a day! Here are a few videos.

The first video is of the 1/6 gravity trainer. This tool was developed when the astronauts were training to go to the moon. It turns out that you can’t simply walk. We tried the bunny hop, the side-to-side, and the slow motion jog. I seemed to do best doing the side-to-side. The video is a bit shaky because it is me holding the camera while I moon walk.


This next video is me taking a ride on the Multi-Axis Trainer (MAT). This was designed to help astronauts get ready for dealing with a possible out-of-control spaceship tumbling in several directions at once.


The neatest thing is that you don’t get sick! There are two reasons. First, your stomach doesn’t move around too much because it is in the center and is not spinning around. Second, the sense of dizziness we get when spinning around come from fluid moving around in our inner ear. But on the MAT, you never spin more than two times in one direction (go back and watch if you don’t believe it). This means that you don’t feel at all dizzy as long as you keep looking forward.

After our time on the simulators we got a chance to walk around and look at some of the museum exhibits. This video is the new exhibit of one of the three remaining Saturn 5 rockets. This one has been refurbished and displayed in a new building. To get a sense of how big it is, look for the class of students sitting on the floor at the end of the video clip.


Today we begin our training for our simulated shuttle mission. I hope I will be mission commander for my group because that means I will be able to fly the shuttle!

Wish me luck.