Space Camp and the Children of the Rocket City
Near Huntsville, Alabama
In nineteen seventy-seven, Wernher von Braun was dying of kidney cancer. He had left NASA in nineteen seventy and spent his final years in aerospace industry work. On one of his last visits to the United States Space and Rocket Center, the museum adjacent to Marshall Space Flight Center that he had championed since the middle nineteen sixties, he proposed an idea: a camp for children, built around the space program, using the museum's trainers and simulators and actual rocket hardware.
Von Braun died in June of nineteen seventy-seven. The idea survived him. Edward Buckbee, the Space and Rocket Center's executive director, developed it into an operational program. Space Camp opened in nineteen eighty-two, offering week-long programs for children between the ages of nine and eleven. Space Academy followed for older students.
The nineteen eighty-six film Space Camp, though fictional and dramatized almost beyond recognition, appeared while the program was running and drove attendance from roughly five thousand participants a year to eleven thousand. The film's timing was complicated: it was produced before the Challenger disaster of January twenty-eighth, nineteen eighty-six, and reached theaters afterward, which created a peculiar dissonance that no one involved had anticipated.
The Space and Rocket Center itself opened on March seventeenth, nineteen seventy. It holds over fifteen hundred artifacts, including the Apollo Sixteen command module and a Saturn Five dynamic test vehicle, a full-scale rocket that was built to absorb the stresses of launch but never to fly. When von Braun persuaded the rival football coaches Bear Bryant of Alabama and Ralph Jordan of Auburn to jointly back the bond referendum that funded it, the vote passed on November thirtieth, nineteen sixty-five. Some problems do not require choosing sides.
