I'm so glad some of you asked about my Space Center mission. I could say I'm writing this "by popular demand," but that's not entirely true. Even if no one had asked, I would have told you. I love the Space Center way too much not to tell you. :)
All day Friday, the anticipation for the mission was building. All my friends knew how much I was looking forward to it, and periodically I would receive a text from Jill or a call from Sara reminding me what was waiting after school. As if I wasn't counting down the hours. As if I hadn't been sending Sara one or two emails every day for the past week with an exact countdown of how many hours, minutes and seconds were left until our mission officially began.
We were going to leave at 4. We actually left at 3:45. Sara, Jill and I piled in the back of Mara's car and went to pick up Jill's friend Destin. He rode shotgun. Directly after that, we got on State Street and headed up to Pleasant Grove to meet Matt at the Space Center. I was so excited I could hardly sit still. We got there about 5 minutes late, I ran in and paid, Matt came soon after that and we started our mission briefing 15 minutes after we were supposed to start. (Which is pretty good, all things considered.)
By the time our Space Center guide led us into the briefing room, I was too antsy to even sit down. He had to ask me to sit like 3 times before I finally obliged. Then he launched into a history of the United Federation of Planets, gave a quick rundown of what the Space Center is (basically, that it's a Star Trek simulator), what our ship the
Galileo was designed for (espionage) and how, and told us the details of our mission. My fellow crew members had lots of questions and comments (many of them sarcastic) to interrupt what, in my opinion, was already the longest mission briefing known to man. Don't get me wrong. I thoroughly enjoy Jill, Mara and Sara's company and I'd already decided I liked Destin and Matt. I just knew the best part was yet to come and every minute spent talking was one less we could spend on the mission.
Assigning the jobs, normally (in my experience) the longest part, actually took the shortest. Here's the rundown: Destin, captain. Matt, navigation/first officer. Me, operations and communication. Mara, security/tactical. Jill, pilot. Sara, engineer. (Destin actually really wanted to be engineer and Matt wanted to be tactical but Mara would not budge on the job and nobody else wanted to be captain.)
Finally our guide led us to the
Galileo, set us in our places, and gave us our training tapes. (They were actually all on cheap MP3s this time.) Training took another 20-30 minutes. I calculated in my head how much time we'd actually be flying our mission and decided we'd better move fast or we weren't going to finish.
The first time the ship computer spoke, Mara looked up at the viewscreen and said, "Sick." (aka, "way cool.") That one comment convinced me the Space Center is worth my love. If Mara, who is not a nerd, can enjoy it and appreciate it as much as I can, it is definitely worth it. The rest in the crew were suitably impressed too.
We were supposed to be rescuing a bunch of Federation and Klingon ambassadors from Orion pirates. And we would have, had we not died 3 times. All three were our fault. The first time, Matt wasn't paying attention and an Orion fighter snuck up on us. The second time, we were killed in an asteroid field on our way to hack the computers at Starbase 101 so we could track the ambassadors. The third time we made it to Starbase 101 but accidentally rammed it. haha
I want to stress that Pilot Jill did an awesome job in each of these situations. Through an amazingly big error in foresight for such a great place, only the navigation officer on the
Galileo can see where the ship is going. It didn't work so great to have Matt yelling, "Go left.
Left. Now right. Faster!" and Jill steer the ship blind. His computer is behind hers, so she can't even glance over at it. She dodged like 10 flying objects during the mission between getting shot at by pirates and going through the asteroid field- an impressive feat considering she couldn't see anything.
The third time we died, when we rammed the starbase (oops), everyone was yelling at Jill to turn, get out of the way. It didn't even occur to me until our guide's voice came over the speakers and said, "You
ran into a starbase?" that we could have just stopped. (Jill told me later it occurred to her, but people kept yelling at her to turn so she did.)
After that, things went wonderfully smooth. Captain Destin persuaded the local military we were Orion pirates (it wasn't too hard, since they steal all their ships from us and couldn't prove we weren't friendly) and Mara hacked into their computers ("My favorite part of the whole mission," she said) and I decoded some of the messages she found and discovered who had the ambassadors and where they were headed. Destin talked the military into letting us leave the starbase and we raced off in pursuit-
And that's were our time ran out and the mission ended.
"It's all right," our guide said. "You knew where the ambassadors were. If you'd had about 10 more minutes I bet you would've rescued them OK. Consider this mission a success."
I don't. But it was fun, and very well done by our officers. (Sara in particular was a pro- we broke so many things and she had them almost all fixed by the end. Some things- like the shields- she had to fix multiple times.) It was great.
Sara making faces
Graig making faces
Looking out over Temple Square from the top of the JSMB
Caroling with the sweet old man (not pictured) playing the piano
Sugar fell asleep on the train ride home
