This morning began in the typical dancing fashion- we are becoming rather familiar with the routines by now!!! We also got to experience some stunning soloists of the girls who were late yesterday, and luckily no one else was late. Breakfast after this was pancakes again, with nice bowls of fruit to go with it. Breakfast went quickly, and it was soon on to getting on with our day.

 

First up was our next presentation about the 7 principles- today’s was entrepreneurism, centred around Franklin Chang Diaz, founder and CEO of Ad Astra rocket company, that is currently working on cutting-edge VASIMR plasma propulsion technology for rocket engines. He is the first Costa-Rican astronaut in space and shares the record for the most space trips: 7! He’s done some really incredible work and his work is the future to facilitating long-term space travel. NASA is funding Ad Astra to keep going on their research in preparation for their future deep space missions.

 

We were set a task during our Mission Brief video at home: get some research ready for an Ad Astra pop quiz! The quiz included questions varied from names of rovers and their missions all the way through to various propulsion systems and the future of Ad Astra and VASMIR. Points were awarded to the most knowledgeable teams in the form of stickers, which we are all aiming to collect (other stickers are awarded for showing other aspects of the 7 success skills we’re being taught, anything from working well as a team during challenges to holding open doors or particularly enthusiastic dancing in the mornings!). Jemima and Tess’ team with Alicia (ex-Dio), Izzy and Zenita (Westlake) took the top prize with a grand total of 24.5 points, receiving a long strip of stickers. After a thrilling victory, or a shameful defeat in other cases, we headed on to work more on our Challenge X projects, and it’s safe to say that we’re all feeling the time crunch…

 

Lunch was held at the American diner Luby’s, a buffet-style lunch. Many of us found the ordering experience a little stressful and the portion sizes were slightly alarming. Nevertheless, we ordered a couple dishes each (salad, main, 2 sides, dessert and drink) and gave it a go. The general consensus was not particularly one of positivity, however, we all chalked it up to being “an experience”. Said ‘experience’ unfortunately included meat being in multiple of the supposedly vegetarian dishes, which we luckily found fairly quickly but not before someone, unfortunately, ate some and promptly felt quite unwell… luckily she recovered quickly as well with profuse apologies. Since the meal included anything and everything from monstrous hunks of meat and salad with two (2) slices of tomato total to what we think was supposed to be a strawberry shortcake which tasted predominantly of sugar and not much strawberry (but certainly a LOT of gelatin), it certainly was an adventure…

 

The bus trip to Ad Astra was pretty fun as we discovered a collective interest in waiata singing, with some classics ‘Te Aroha’ and ‘Tutira Mai’. There are some others that a few of the group know, so there has been some more teaching going on, which is a nice way to be more unified.

 

The visit to Ad Astra would have to be the highlight of the day. Firstly, we had a powerpoint presentation from one of the head engineers/designers working on the rocket, getting an explanation as to how their plasma propulsion VASIMR technology works. Though the physics was pretty extreme, we could apply and understand some ideas we have covered, such as current induction to slow a material travelling in a conductive pipe (Lenz’s law), magnetic fields, and it was fascinating to listen to and very inspiring in terms of future thinking and believing in the supposedly impossible. Then we got to go in and see where the testing of their rocket engine took place, in a large cylindrical vacuum chamber, as well as asking the engineer lots of questions.

 

On our way out, we were lucky enough to encounter Dr Chang Diaz himself!! Our group accosted him with excited requests for photos and signatures on our lanyards, which he politely indulged, much to our delight! We were all so excited, and we even sang Tutira Mai to him, which he seemed to enjoy (and one of his colleagues recorded from behind us). We were so shaky that we didn’t even care about the few metres in torrential rain to get back into the bus- Troy, our bus driver, was kind enough to pull as close as possible for us.

 

During the ride back towards the hotel, we stopped off at what might not be a tourist attraction but was certainly exciting to us- Wholefoods! Wholefood is a supermarket which specialises in health foods, no preservatives allowed, and we took our time exploring the isles and selecting a few things to test or just marvelling at what the shelves stocked. A personal shoutout goes to Emma (from B23, not B24) who managed to come out of Wholefoods with no food, but four plush toys instead!

 

After completing the rest of the journey back, a quick trip to our rooms to drop off the food, we were straight back into work. This time, our sixth principle: Agility. In this workshop, we learnt about The Ordinary Spaceman, Clayton Anderson, who applied 15 times to be an astronaut and refining his CV until he finally made it. He is certainly an inspiration to stay agile and always commit to working hard to achieve our dreams, no matter how big.

 

We then tried to maximise our time with a bit more Challenge X work before dinner- which we devoured and headed back to our group room. Just as we were preparing to leave, we got told that there was something exciting waiting outside for us- mango and chocolate gelato! We rushed to grab our share, some of us before even finishing our dinner, and hurried back to enjoy the indulgence. Over the last few days, we have also discovered some interesting eating habits in our group, namely the eating of apples with a knife and fork at the breakfast table. Tonight we added eating ice cream with a knife in the middle of the main dinner meal to that list (Ananya). Back at the group room, we made our lists of what roles we’d prefer to do in the mission simulation for tomorrow. It was hard to choose between so many cool roles!

 

Once we’d made some difficult decisions, we headed off to another guest speaker talk from Tom Nolan. From a dolphin trainer who hated school, he is now an Operations Engineer at NASA with degrees in Marine Biology and Oceanography. I (Emma) can honestly say he was the most inspiring person I’ve heard speak so far, at least personally. He preached the message of the importance of being in awe of what is happening, even under our own feet. Knowing that the world is amazing, that what we as a human race can and have achieved is amazing, and that we are all people who can achieve amazing things if we just keep working on our passions. Not only is the work that he’s done super inspirational, managing equipment at many different levels to record public data for the world to access, we all came away with the knowledge that at least there’d be a “Crazy old man, probably drooling a little, sitting on a rocking chair in California staring at the sky and saying ‘Go baby, go!’”.

 

We rounded out our evening with reflection zone/Challenge X time. Mr Nolan was kind enough to visit our room, where we eagerly thanked him (Ananya and Emma giving small gifts) and hearing some final words of inspiration. He said that hopefully at least if he was only a flash in the pan, someone can fan that spark into a flame. We then settled in once more and worked late into the evening before drifting off towards our rooms to (do more work… oops?) get some rest for the exciting day up ahead.

– Emma, Anneke and Jemima over and out