DATE: Saturday, August 2, 1997              TAG: 9708020234

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B3   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY NANCY YOUNG, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: CHESAPEAKE                        LENGTH:   77 lines

STUDENTS GRAVITATE TOGETHER AT SPACE CAMP

It was T-20 minutes and counting when the head of mission control announced fueling operations for the orbiter Chesapeake were complete.

In other words, the bus was ready to roll.

Or fly.

``I never thought 17,000 miles per hour could be so slow,'' joked Jeff Weir, payload specialist and a rising eighth-grader at Great Bridge Middle School.

He and his fellow astronauts were cruising around the Cedar Road parking lot of the Chesapeake Center for Science And Technology Friday on their final mission of the week for Project S.A.L.U.T.E., a weeklong summer space camp for city middle school students designed to let them explore space travel close to home.

About 55 students took part in the camp which centers around simulating flights on a space shuttle using a retooled school bus.

Among other things, the bus has a student-designed mechanical arm attached to its roof to retrieve things like ``satellites'' off the surface of the moon or a planet. In Friday's mission, a cardboard box was substituted for the satellite; the school's roof served as the planet surface.

The students were divided into five teams - mission control, medical, experimental, design and communications - which worked together to prepare for every aspect of space flight. They first tested their knowledge Wednesday with a test launch plagued by glitches - both planned and unplanned. Afterward, there was a ``debriefing.''

``They talked about all the problems,'' said Jarred Cotton, summer school coordinator for the center. ``The main focus is, of course, team work.''

On that first mission, the communication system between mission control inside the school and the astronauts on the bus broke down, leaving the astronauts temporarily in limbo.

There was also a planned glitch - planted by the teachers in the program to test the campers' problem solving abilities. The astronauts were told one of them had dangerously high blood pressure - prompting repeated blood pressure checks from the shuttle's medical specialist. Part of the medical team's training was learning how to take a pulse and measure blood pressure.

It was an experience that in retrospect was a lot more fun than it seemed at first, said Jessica Buckman, a rising seventh-grader at Great Bridge Middle School, one of the astronauts on that test launch.

``I look at it now and it was a lot of fun. At the time it was really stressful. All this stuff was happening at the same time,'' said Jessica, 11. ``Now I really want to go again.''

At the debriefing session, Jessica said she and others recommended that Friday's astronauts receive more training. The suggestion was taken to heart, to the benefit of students such as Lee Clarke, a mission specialist and a rising seventh-grade student at Western Branch Middle School.

While Lee, 12, thinks that in real life it might be cool to be a part of mission control on the ground, he said he has no desire to go up in an actual space shuttle.

``Just about the last thing I'd want to be after growing up is being sucked into space,'' Lee said.

But experiencing space flight in a parking lot seemed to suit Lee just fine, as the crew and mission control worked together to solve the problems affecting the operation of the mechanical arm. The problems were solved in time to remove an old satellite from the roof and replace it with a ``hurricane tracker'' - aluminum foil cake tins held together by string.

``We threw a lot of problems at them. I think we were pushing them toward overload,'' said Ed Isajewicz, the team leader for the mission control students, a former naval flight officer himself.

``From the standpoint of the teams working together on the problems and the solutions, the mission was more than a success.'' CHESAPEAKE - It was T-20 minutes and counting when the head of mission control announced fueling operations for the orbiter Chesapeake were complete. ILLUSTRATION: Photo

MOTOYA NAKAMURA/The Virginian-Pilot

Campers Lee Clarke, left, Jeff Weir and Elizabeth Snellings use a

student-designed mechanical arm to retrieve a cardboard

``satellite'' from inside a space shuttle - a school bus - during

Project S.A.L.U.T.E., a summer space camp at the Chesapeake Center

for Science And Technology.

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