Hi James,

I have never been into space, but I have been to the U.S. Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama. I won a trip to Space Camp in a contest sponsored by a local dairy when I was in high school. I had to answer trivia questions about space for the contest, like "What was the first satellite?" Space Camp was pretty exciting. We got to train for a simulated Space Shuttle mission just like the real astronauts do. We did two simulated missions. For the first simulated mission, I was the commander and I got to sit up in the cockpit and fly the simulator. That was really cool! There are an awful lot of buttons, switches and indicators in the Space Shuttle cockpit. Some of them are warning lights like the ones in your car that light up if there is a problem with the engine. Part of our training at Space Camp was to learn what to do when different warning lights indicated there was a problem. The camp counselors had fun turning on several warning indicators at once, just to see how fast we could flip the switches to change to the backup systems. For the second simulated mission, I worked in the mission control.

I think it would be a lot of fun to fly in space, but it isn't really necessary for my work. An unmanned satellite or rover can take data for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, without human intervention and it can stay in regions where it would be difficult or dangerous to send a person. For example, I'm studying the Van Allen radiation belts right now. It probably wouldn't be terribly healthy for a person to spend a lot of time there during a really big geomagnetic storm, and I don't think anyone who did would come back to Earth with mutant superhero powers like the Fantastic 4.

Kris