Casa Grande High School student Kyle Pereira, 16, recently returned from Space Camp at the United States Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Pereira was among a select group of high school students invited to attend the Honeywell Leadership Challenge Academy, which ran in Huntsville from Feb. 26-March 2. While at Space Camp, Pereira had the opportunity to meet and work with aerospace engineers, former astronauts, and NASA scientists, all while experiencing “real world challenge scenarios,” which included aircraft and space shuttle mission simulations, and a wild ride inside a giant centrifuge.
Upon arrival, Pereira said, groups and teams of participants were formed.
“There were students from California,?Korea, Germany, India, Norway, Australia and France, just in my group,” explained Pereira.
When he was first issued his flight suit, he noticed the name tag was upside down. Pereira quickly learned why.
“Students are only allowed to wear them correctly upon graduation,” he said, “to symbolize we’d made it through the week.”
Pereira’s team - called “Team Focus” - was overseen by two college-age crew trainers, who went by the call signs “Super Soaker” and “Gravy.” His own call sign was “Pop Tart.”
“I ate a lot of them,” he admitted.
As team leader, Pereira says he needed to overcome language and cultural barriers in order to complete the team’s assigned tasks, the first of which was to design, build, and launch a rocket by week’s end, which he admits was fun.
“My dream job would be to design spacecraft to go out of the solar system,” he said.
Pereira did get a chance to sit in an actual space capsule, which he found to be “pretty cool.”
“It looked like it would be tight,” he said, “but it was really comfortable. Lots of room actually.”
Asked about his own prediction for the future of space travel, Pereira foresees manned spacecraft the size of a small room going into space, doing a designated job, and then coming back to Earth.
“Eventually,” he predicted, “anyone who wants to go up there can.”
On his second day at Space Camp, Pereira and his team programmed a computer-chip, named “Raspberry Pie,” to relay velocity from their rocket back to earth.
Then it was his turn in the giant Centrifuge. Capable of producing 3G’s - three times the force of gravity - the Centrifuge, he explained, whips around fast enough to make your face deform.Some people couldn’t handle it, and became sick, as a member of another team did. And how did Pereira do?
He loved it, and found out something most people never get to learn first-hand.
“It is very difficult to high-five someone at 3Gs,” he said.
The next day, all teams were presented with a National Disaster Scenario. Pereira was put in command of a virtual search-and-rescue team, and sent into a hurricane-ravaged mall, to search for survivors and shut off the gas valves. During the simulation, Pereira got his multi-national team moving efficiently through the mall, locating and rescuing over 70 people - four times more than the next team. As Pereira adapted to being in command, he says he became more and more comfortable.
“Things got better and the team started working smoothly,” he recalled. Afterward, however, the team guides caught a missed gas valve, and informed him that the subsequent explosion killed 12 people. Despite his efficiency and caution, Pereira learned how easy it is, under such high pressure situations, to overlook something important.
“Mistakes still happen,” he said.
Speaking of which.
“The fourth day was Launch Day,” Pereira said. “We [had] constructed a two stage rocket, starting with basic model kits, chose the diameter of the tube, and calculated the wing sizes and nose cone shape.” When it was Pereira’s turn to launch, things didn’t go as hoped. “When the second stage was about to go off,” he said, “it just shot off sideways.”
Appearing before a panel of experts - which included a former astronaut and other aerospace specialists - Pereira’s team analyzed its data. The first stage had ignited properly. The second stage ignited, but most likely a fin malfunction forced the rocket to veer off and shoot sideways, silencing its telemetry.
“We found it after,” Pereira said. “It was apart, but we did find it.”
And then there was the day everyone died.
At Mission Control, at the Space & Rocket Center, Pereira had a chance to experience a Shuttle mission simulation as one of eight flight controllers. Each controller manages a specific area. Pereira’s job was E-COM, in charge of monitoring all electronic systems on board the six crew shuttle. The exercise is a real time simulation, with monitors that light up, manuals with check lists, and regular input from the faculty, designed to simulate real time malfunctions, measuring the control team’s skill, as well as the shuttle astronauts’ ability to correct for errors, just as they would during a mission.
Following a simulated spacewalk, the shuttle crew began procedures for returning to earth. Unfortunately, upon reentry, the hatch opened and the entire crew was lost. After review it was discovered that the button for controlling the hatch hadn’t been depressed long enough, leaving a small gap. Pereira was not pleased.
“You think someone on the shuttle would have noticed the hatch open,” he said.
Admitting that he’s always been fascinated by the way things work, Pereira says he hopes to become a real-life aerospace engineer, and would love to attend MIT. That said, he doesn’t see himself as an astronaut.
“It would be fun, but there are risks involved,” he allowed. “I want to stay on Earth as part of mission control. I want to tell the crew what to do and know, ‘Wow! I sent people up there!”
Asked what he gained from his experience, Pereira points out the leadership training aspects, which he says have made him much more comfortable with being in control of situations.
“The experience was fantastic,” he said, “but it was the friendships I made, meeting people from other countries and gaining insight into their cultures, that I enjoyed most.”
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