KaiYves’s Spacey Day in New York

KaiYves sent this illustrated report on her spring break:

I wanted to go to a lot of space-related places in the New York area over Spring Break, but the problem is that my parents still had work and my brothers still had school, so my dad told me I could go see them all, as long as I did it all in one day, I woke up at 4 AM to drive into Manhattan with him, and I took cabs in-between all the sites and paid for my own cab fare.

Naturally, I agreed.

After a nap and breakfast at my grandmother’s apartment, I headed off to my first stop, the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum, with my cousin Alana tagging along. I hadn’t visited since August of 2010, before the Intrepid was announced as the future home of the Space Shuttle Enterprise, so I was curious to see how the preparations were going.

We saw the spray-paint outline of where the shuttle will be placed on the flight deck, as seen in the attached illustration.

The pink circle is where one of the shuttle’s wheels will be.

We also climbed into the replica Gemini capsule, where a nice lady took our picture.

Me: “Okay, so climb in.”
Alana: “Okay.”
Me: “Your head goes here, your feet go here.”
Alana: “Okay.”
Me: “This is your world for two weeks.”
Alana: “No way!”

Sadly, we didn’t have time to see the Concorde up-close, as we only had an hour before Alana had to catch her cab back to my grandmother’s, and I had to catch another to my next site.

That site was the New York City Center for Space Science Education. It’s attached to a school, and kids come in to learn about science and teamwork through various simulations. (As opposed to my High School, where I got told to get off a library computer “if I wasn’t doing something useful” when I was watching a space shuttle launch…)

I got to try flying a plane around New York in the flight simulator– I took off from LaGuardia, navigated to another airport, and landed without crashing!

Then they let me play with the wind tunnel.

The real focus of the facility, though, is the Challenger Center, where classes come for field trips. Half the class gets to be astronauts in the space station room, while the other half are Flight Controllers in the Mission Control room. They work together over headsets to do experiments and solve problems. When I was there, they were set up for a mission to Comet Halley.

Space station room:

Mission Control:

I tried to take a self-portrait in one of the mirrors they had in the Mission Control room:

After hanging out with the absolutely flamablamablous staff, my dad called and told me I was late, so I caught a cab (after about 20 went by with people in them) to the school he was at and met up with him again.

Then, we went to my aunt’s house in Garden City and had tacos for dinner. My dad had to go back to the City because something had come up at work, so my uncle drove me to the Cradle of Aviation Museum, where we had bought tickets to hear astronaut Ron Garan speak. (The same guy we saw at the NASA TweetUp in DC last month.)

This is a model of a Voyager probe that is hanging in the museum cafe:

As a New Yorker, I take great pride in the fact that the Lunar Module was built by Grumman in Bethpage, not far from where the museum is. This is an unused one on display at the museum:

Mr. Garan’s presentation was great, and afterwards, I got his autograph and this picture:

I asked him what his favorite photo that he took in space was, and he said he couldn’t pick, but he thought it was really incredible that he’d been able to capture the image Robert posted back in August as the “Best. Meteor. Ever.”

I’m sorry it took me so long to send these in, I was busy with school.

All the best,

Kai