The Space Center: An Introduction

When I was a teenager, I had the privilege of working at the Christa McAuliffe Space Center. Built in an unassuming neighborhood in a 1960s-era elementary school, patrons would assume roles on the bridge of star ship simulators that looked and felt extremely real. The primary target audience were 10-14 year olds, whose first experience was on a field trip with their classmates in fifth and sixth grade.

It’s hard to describe exactly what the Space Center is. Fortunately, there’s a short documentary filmed in about 2007 that captures one of those field trips.

The field trips were built around the social studies curriculum for the year. Missions included encounters with runaway slaves, navigating the politics of rising fascism on another planet, environmental disasters where the wealthy had bunkers and the poor were unprotected on the surface, and more. Some of the flights had a decidedly STEM flavor, focusing on supernovas, time dilation, and black holes.

After school, flights would often be more about going on adventures and having a good time at a birthday party for a few hours. Weekends and summers included overnight experiences where campers would stay the night on cots in the school, sometimes on the simulators themselves.

Since its inception in 1990, hundreds of thousands of campers have come, flown, and left. Invariably, when I meet someone who went there at some point, all the details come rushing back for them. “Oh, I was the so-and-so officer, and there was this alien ship, and we almost lost the mission but then I did such-and-such and saved the day!” These are details from years if not decades ago, and yet people who experienced the Space Center remember it in vivid detail. Ask them if they remember the fractions assignment from that same week and doubtless they won’t, but there’s something sticky about a Space Center flight.

Volunteering

The Space Center wasn’t just for patrons. Although negotiating your way through a conflict with a hostile alien leaves an impression on a classroom of students, everything that happened during a flight was powered by a small army of volunteers. From the acting and stage management to writing software and designing visual effects, the volunteer program at the Space Center was a one-of-a-kind after school opportunity for High School students such as myself.

For me, this meant learning how to program the elaborate simulation software that powered the Space Center’s flights. I then graduated into teaching other students how to do the same, while developing novel visual and technical effects for the Space Center’s fleet of five simulators. Working with customers as they came for flights, helping to brief and board the crews, and then helping to run the flights rounded out the overall experience.

Expanding the program

In the 2010s, the Space Center was at risk of being defunded and shut down. I was part of a group of former volunteers who had grown up and could mount a political campaign to save the Space Center. We incorporated a non-profit foundation to guide those efforts that we ran for several years until the Space Center’s future was secured. The original center was not only retained, but expanded as part of a new Elementary School construction project. Other centers have since started up, and the Space Center model can now be found in a variety of formats in classrooms across the United States and even around the world.

Since then, my involvement with the Space Center has been more limited, notwithstanding my appreciation for the impact of the program in my life and in the lives of so many patrons, volunteers, and families over the years.