Hello Troops, Several of you sent emails requesting information on the Galileo. I'll take a moment and being everyone up to date.
The Galileo is back at Scenic Services in Lindon where it is being reassembled by Kyle Herring and his team.
Chairs and desks are being installed. Touch screens, computer and network cables are being installed. Additional work on the power system is being done.
The Galileo will be brought to the Space Center September 14th and parked next to 'old' Galileo. Equipment from the current Galileo will be installed in the new Galileo.
The current Galileo will be taken apart. We are trying to find a buyer. We'd to find it a good home.
The new Galileo will open for missions once the computer programs are written.
I'm guessing the Galileo will open for missions around the middle of September.
The Galileo officially opens on November 8, 2009 as part of the Space Center's 19th Birthday Celebrations!
I'm hoping that answers all the questions about the Galileo. If not, send them along and I'll do a better job getting your questions answered here on the Blog.
Hello Troops, It doesn’t take a seer to imagine what’s happening throughout the towns, villages, and hamlets across this vast Alpine School District. Children are filling their backpacks with pencils, pens, erasers, notebooks, calculators and rulers in preparation for tomorrow’s first day of school. Clothes are spread out over beds while boys and girls make the most important decision of the day - what to wear. Does this match that and does that go with this? Some mothers stand by as consultants, others wouldn’t attempt to get involved in a clothes discussion with their teenager - It’s too risky. Dads are blissfully and permanently excluded from ‘What to Wear’ discussions. Most men are not blessed with the correct rods and cones in their eyes to see the subtleties of fabric and color required for clothes matching. Best to stick with what we know best; sports, electronics and television.
I dreaded the first day of school as a child. I dreaded what my new teacher would be like. I dreaded the thought of learning new math. I mourned the loss of my freedom. No more carefree days spent on my bicycle exploring the streets and avenues of Rapid City, South Dakota. No more lazy afternoons at the public pool. No more long walks home from a day of swimming with my friends. No more treasure hunting under the bleachers at the ball parks. No more sugar stops at the Dairy Queen on Cottonwood Lane filling up on 1 penny Red Vines with our 'under the bleacher' findings.
The end of summer meant an end to our summer backyard sleep overs, and with them went our double dog dare midnight romps through our Canyon Lake neighborhood. Those early 1970's midnight adventures bring fond memories of my gang and I. We prowled our turf - finding imaginative and unholy matchings of toilet paper with trees, cars, fences, bikes and other things best left unmentioned as per instructions issued by the Rapid City Police Department.
We made our own fun in those days. You had to. There were no DVD’s or video machines. There were no iPods or computers. You got up, put on your swimming suit and Tshirt, did your chores, scrounged for money in your mom’s purse or between the couch cushions and hit the road with your friends on your bikes. If we had enough money we cycled several miles to the Kresge's at Bacon Park. Kresge's had a diner with 50 cent hot fudge sundaes. If you got bored waiting for the pool to open you cycled to the spillway on Canyon Lake Dam. Who needed a Lagoon when you had a mossy, slimy dam spillway to slide down? What a blast it was tumbling down the spillway into the creek below, then crawling back up, sometimes making it and others slipping and toppling back down - taking your friends with you.
It was important to our mothers to come home for dinner. As soon as supper was inhaled we were back on our bikes, setting a course for the dirt hills. The dirt hills were magical. We split into teams, staked out our forts and proceeded with vicious and sometimes bloody dirt clod fights.
Those were the good old day of my summers........
Now, its time for school. Summer is over so we put summer things away and get down to business. I urge all of you to work hard in school. Set good goals and do everything you can to reach them. Remember, you’re in school to learn and teachers are there to teach. It is a partnership. The vast majority of teachers really do care about you and your grades. They want you to succeed but can’t force you. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. That saying applies to you and your education. Drink deeply. Satisfy your cravings for knowledge. Learn to think and reason so you can become a productive member of society. That’s is all we ask. Is it too much?
Remember, us old timers are not going to be around forever. You will grow up and take over for us. That can be frightening. Do a better job than we are doing in the way you care for this country and planet when its your turn to make decisions. America’s best years are before us, not behind us as many might say. Find a way to make the world a better place because you’re here......now.
Enjoy this year. Make new friends. Grow and develop into the kind of person you want everyone to think you are.
And to our young volunteers and staff - I’ll see you here in the trenches.
From high atop Mr. Olympus they came in a shimmering chariot called Galileo. These immortals landed in a small obscure hamlet in a place called Utah. Their quest was to live among us and learn the mortal ways. At Zeus’s bidding they were commanded to give the children of men a moment of time in a silver chariot forged in Hephaestus' fire.
Hundreds of mortals experienced the Galileo, this Olympian Chariot of Fire. Its true immortal identity hidden and its glory diffused so as not to overwhelm their senses - thus causing them to immediately transfigure and reappear on the golden, windswept Elysian Fields.
The Olympians took mortal names and form. Referring to themselves as Kyle, Stacy, Taylor, Emily, Jon, Megan and perhaps others whom I never saw. And so they lived for days with us.
Now they are gone. The place where the Galileo stood is empty with no marker or stone to commemorate the supernatural event which transpired there. The immortals have returned to Olympus to make their report to Zeus.
Are we not all blessed for their visit? For in the end, the memory of what we saw, heard and touched will remain with us until the last breath leaves our lungs and the boatman appears at our bedside to ferry us across the dark waters of the river Styx to join our brethren in the land of eternal twilight.
Friends, I want to thank Kyle Herring and those that responded to his call (Stacy Carroll, Taylor Thomas, Jon Parker, Megan Warner, Emily Perry, Spencer Robinson and others whom I may not know about) for assistance. They performed the impossible. They worked tirelessly, nearly around the clock to prepare the Galileo for the Utah County Fair this past weekend. The ship was dismantled and trucked to Spanish Fork, then reassembled under a canopy. This was the first time the Galileo was dismantled, then reassembled. Much was learned and changes will be made. We learned a large truck with a hydraulic lift is a necessity (their broken backs, ribs, fingers, heads, and spirits all agree). We learned setting the Galileo up on asphalt is a no no. The ball bearing wheels created divots in the pavement as the daily temperatures climbed. We relearned the lesson about never trusting Mother Nature. This was an event requiring dry weather. Instead we got rain three of the four days we were down there.
I was there Thursday afternoon when the Galileo officially opened for tours. There were many excited children waiting in line. The tours continued over the weekend, one after the other, in an endless stream of the curious. Questions were answered and pamphlets distributed.
A group on tour during the Fair in the Galileo
Every evening the staff went home to sleep except for Kyle. Kyle couldn’t leave the safety and security of this new simulator in the hands of Fairground security. Kyle decided to sleep in the Galileo Wednesday through Friday nights. That is dedication. That is the definition of going the extra mile. There is nothing more I can do than to say “Thank you Kyle,” and leave it at that.
Kyle made a video journal of his Fairground sleeping experience he posted to his Facebook account. I’m included them in this post. (Reminded me a bit of the Blair Witch Project.....)
Once again, a sincere thank you and congratulations to our Space Center team for pulling something off I thought couldn’t be done in the short amount of time we had to do it.
Mr. Williamson
Troops. The Daily Herald did an article on the Galileo at the County Fair (included below in this post). The article appeared in Sunday's Paper.
New mobile flight simulator debuts at Utah County Fair
Kira Johnson - Daily Herald | Posted: Sunday, August 16, 2009 12:10 am
With the neon blue glow of overhead lights purpling her lips, the low ceiling making her look abnormally tall, flight director Emily Perry grins at 11-year-old Colin Collyer who's currently perched in tactical.
"What we do is we take people just like you and we give you guys a mission objective and we send you off into space and each one of you has a position," she says. "We give you these jobs so that you and your team can fly around and blow stuff up and you save the universe."
Perry, 20, a Provo resident studying history education at BYU, is giving a tour of the Galileo Mark VI, The Christa McAuliffe Space Education Center's newly commissioned mobile flight simulator, which is two weeks shy of final completion. The Galileo Mark VI, built with the help of a team of BYU students, is meant to replace the Galileo Mark V at the Christa McAuliffe space center, located at Central Elementary School in Pleasant Grove.
The space center staff spent this past week on its debut flight, a trip to the Utah County Fair in Spanish Fork.
"We needed to test the moveability of the center," said concept creator and manager David Kyle Herring. "We thought it would be a great opportunity to test it and show it off and maybe even raise some money to help finish the project." The space center is still about $5,000 short of their final goal.
Collyer, his Dad, Brian, and his two sisters, Regin and Bryn, are seated in leather chairs bolted to the floor facing a large flat-screen monitor mounted in the front bulkhead. At each of the stations where the Collyers sit, brackets mark where future touch screen monitors will convey information pertinent to each simulation. Behind the bridge of the ship is a short compartment flanked by a pair of padded bunks.
It's a tight space, made to stimulate the imagination and approximate what it feels like to serve onboard a space shuttle.
Originally the Galileo Mark V was built in 1999 with a life expectancy of three years, said set director Stacy Carrell. Ten years and nearly $40,000 later, the center is finally ready to replace the original with a lighter, more tech savvy version. With the help of a team of manufacturing engineering technology and mechanical engineering majors at BYU, the space center team has designed a module that can be taken off campus.
"The simulator is the most sophisticated one that we have so far," Carrell said. "We're using a lot of new technology that we've never used before, upgrading things and advancing things, taking what we've learned building other simulators and bringing them to this one."
The BYU team of seven students who built the frame began the process last September as a capstone course.
"When we were finished we had a structural skeleton that could be taken apart and put back together so it could be loaded on a trailer and hauled around," said Terri Bateman, a part-time faculty member in the mechanical engineering department.
Bateman was the faculty mentor for the capstone team that constructed the frame.
"When we first started working on the space ship program, Kyle told our team that we should experience the missions ourselves," Bateman said. "I recognized right off the bat how complex this program that they've put together is," she continued. "There are TV screens that are telling you what to do, there's lights and sound. Each child has their own computer. It's really complex all the things they've put together to make it a multi-sensory experience."
The Galileo is the only one of five simulators at the center that has the exterior representation of a space module.
The other four are built into the school campus, one of which doubles as a computer lab during the day.
When finished, the Galileo Mark VI will take the previous module's place in the school's cafeteria.
Together the five simulators can handle up to 60 students a day.
This trip to the fair was the first time the ship had been disassembled, moved and reassembled, and already the team is learning that the new model poses its own set of challenges.
Victor Williamson, the center's director, said the Galileo is merely an extension of a student-driven program that has been working for years to enhance the learning experience by simulating real-world situations.
"Instead of a unit taught out of a book, now there are simulations where students are thrown into experiences that are as close to real life as possible," Williamson said. "It takes longer to teach in a simulation, but the learning stays much longer than when it's taught in traditional methods."
The space center has hosted nearly 220,000 students, teachers and parents over the past 19 years.
"We put these kids in these adult roles, and they have adult situations," Herring said. "We do a really good job at throwing problems at them and doing it in such a way where we don't overstress them out. We have made kids cry before. There's a lot of stress on one of these missions because they have to work as a team."
