20 Sep 2013
Houston, we have a problem!
After a few technical problems 1/2M and 1/2B were able to talk to the Houston Space Centre in Houston Texas as part of our Transport Unit in HSIE. We were initially going to have a virtual excursion to learn about rockets; however Houston had a few technical issues so we were then given the opportunity to have a discussion and ask questions with an expert from the Space Centre named Chris who is the son of astronaut Robert Cobana. We were promised a relaunch of our Rockets Virtual Excursion presentation in the near future.
Students were extremely excited to ask questions including;
What it is like to be an astronaut?
How big are rockets?
How long it takes to travel to the moon?
Space facts:
Astronauts eat ‘freeze dried' food such as ‘teriyaki chicken and rice' in space. They have to inject water into the food with a needle to make it look and taste normal again. They also eat M & Ms called ‘candy coated chocolates'!
Rockets are equipped with special ‘bucket' seats to enable the astronauts to lie back whilst waiting to be launched and be safe enough to hold them in for blast off.
The temperature in space varies from 200 degrees Celsius to 250 degrees below Celsius so the astronauts have to wear special suits to protect them and to help them breathe in space.
The distance from Earth to the Moon is 300,000 kms! It takes 3 days to travel to the moon from earth.
The NASA rockets are as tall as one soccer goal to another (in length).
The rockets use the equivalent fuel of 3 large lakes of water for one trip!
Rockets are heavy. They weigh several hundreds of thousands of pounds.
It was 44 years ago that man first landed on the moon.
We are very excited to once again take another journey into space next term.
Miss Toop and Mr Bush