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San Francisco, 7:36 PM
Wed Nov 25
23 posts in the last 24 hours
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11/03/09
The Space center is officially named "The Christa McAcAuliffe Space Education Center" after the teacher that died when the Challenger exploded. It's located in an elementary school in Pleasant Grove, UT.
The gist of what goes on there is these guys write their own Star Trek universe missions, some of which are based on historical events. Each ship has multiple crew positions. The ship that is up for auction has room for 5. Four of the stations have computers, plus the captain. The largest ship takes up two large rooms in the school and has a maximum crew of 18.
The Space Center generally caters to school groups between 4th and 6th grade, but they do have older groups come on occasion. The ships are designed such that every position on the crew is essential - nearly everyone will have an opportunity to make a critical decision that will either save the crew, or kill them.
The campers (as we called them) were free to make whatever decisions they wanted during the course of the mission, and the staff had to react to their decisions. Including things like negotiating with aliens (Klingons, Romulans, etc.) and every mission always has some sort of exciting life or death climax/race to the finish.
We've actually had several kids that ended up working for NASA as a result of the experience they had at the Space Center. The real crux of the experience, however, was the teamwork aspect. You had to learn to work with all these people (many of whom you may have never met before) or you wouldn't get to the end of the mission and find out how the story ends.
Their website is: [www.spacecamputah.org]
and a picture of the replacement for this ship can be seen on their blog at:
[voyagerslog.blogspot.com] #startrek
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11/03/09
heh, this reminds me of the second grade, where every class except mine got to make a space ship out of a refrigerator box. so after some poking around at the end of 'space month' or whatever, i got to take one of them home. i had it out in the yard until the rain made it fall apart. #startrek
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11/03/09
Makes me wish the STE would hurry up and re-open. I need my shuttlecraft fix, damn it! #startrek
11/03/09
11/03/09
The mayor was pretty vocal about it, which surprised the hell out of me.
There's not been any real news on it in ages - but I'm not quite ready to give up that dream just yet. #startrek
11/03/09
The target audience for this experience is 4th-8th grades with missions oriented more towards older (high school age) kids run during the summer. #startrek
11/03/09
This teacher was later given a grant to transform a classroom into a simulator, and within six years he had five working simulators used during the day as other elementary schools would visit for field trips, and after school or over-night missions, where it was more of a Star Trek simulator and less of a classroom.
I, I different times, have played roles like: Klingon, Romulan, Chief Engineer, and Orion Pirate (an original faction created by the director of the simulator.)
11/03/09
And here is a picture of the New Galileo. Man, it looks A LOT more spiffy then the old one....
[voyagerslog.blogspot.com]
They're selling the old one, because, well, it's old. And yes, the New Galileo still uses LCARS (the Star Trek computer interface).
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Other than at a SF convention.
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Oddly enough my wife and I still volunteer with them during the summer to help them with makeup effects for long-form (overnight) missions. #startrek
09/15/09
i would love to have a bone from a dinosaur
09/14/09
Maybe I could put it in the cockpit of the viper...
09/14/09
With that said, please continue discussing the whoring out of scientifically valuable extinct lifeforms.
09/14/09
09/15/09
But, yes, sometimes museums do sell off specimens. It usually is a last-ditch sort of action, not something planned so that they can wheel in a different display. Similar to how art museums don't sell Rembrandts so they can put up a painting by some hot new artist.
Also, don't know whether you were aware of this or not, but saying that a scientific specimen can be studied to death implies that somehow an individual specimen reaches a research asymptote, after which no more data can be gleaned from it. Is that your actual view?
09/15/09
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09/14/09
A) Steal a car
B) Rob a bank on the way to Las Vegas.
C) Avoid the po-po long enough to make a winning bid.
The things I do for love...