posted 11-22-2011 02:28 PM               

Mike Kersjes always believed that his students could do anything — even attend the prestigious Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama, where some of America's best and brightest high school students compete in a variety of activities similar to those experienced by NASA astronauts training for space shuttle missions. The challenge was convincing everyone else that the kids in his special education class, with disabilities including Tourette's syndrome, Down's syndrome, dyslexia, eating disorders, and a variety of emotional problems, would benefit from the experience and succeed.

With remarkable persistence, Kersjes broke down one barrier after another, from his own principal's office to the inner sanctum of NASA, until Space Camp finally opened its doors. After nine months of rigorous preparation, Kersjes's class arrived at Space Camp, where they turned in a performance beyond everyone's expectations.

About the Author

Mike Kesjes is president of Space Is Special Inc., a not for profit organization that helps special education students enhance their science and mathematics skills using space as a motivational theme. Mike has been a special education teacher and football coach for over 20 years with the Forest Hills Public School system and is currently working with NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and the University of California, Irvine. He lives in Grand Rapids MI.

Joe Layden is an award-winning journalist and New York Times best selling author. He lives in upstate New York.

• Paperback: 288 pages
  
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin (January 17, 2012)
  
• ISBN-10: 1250012627
  
• ISBN-13: 978-1250012623

posted 11-22-2011 10:39 PM               

Note that they say the movie takes place in the 80s and a scene was filmed with the Saturn V. It's indoors now but sure wasn't back then. Beats me how much has changed at the center since the 80s, but I'll bet people familiar with the area with note all kinds of things that didn't exist in the 80s or were totally different then.

I'm sure the focus will be on the kids and their issues, as opposed to the camp itself. All I know is Space Camp deserves some manner of representation on film that is realistic, as opposed to the movie from the 80s (you have to feel sorry for the producers as the movie came out almost exactly when the Challenger disaster occurred).

Hallmark productions can be more sappy than their cards, but I'll be watching this when it airs just the same.

posted 01-29-2012 10:20 PM               

Moving, a tear jerker, rooting for the underdog.

posted 01-29-2012 11:06 PM               

The Space Camp movie filmed in 1985 was a pretty good snapshot of what the camp looked like when I was there (even if they didn't show the dome structures we were using for the camp simulators themselves), but I know they had started adding to the simulator base a year or two later after the movie came out and increased international interest in it (I'm not sure exactly what the timeline was though). The Pathfinder display also found its way to Huntsville at about the same time. Considering all that stuff that has to be hidden from view or disguised, it is kind of hard to NOT film a replica Saturn V moon rocket sitting in the middle of the rocket garden. No matter where you are it keeps drawing your eye to it.

I picked up a copy of the book many years ago, but have yet to read it. I imagine the story is better than the film, but I believe they did a pretty good job conveying the story to film. So I didn't want to crash read either and spend most of my time second guessing technical details. Sometimes you've got to just sit back and enjoy the ride.

I loved the 1980s touches of no cell phones and no personal computers. So grant requests had to be done on a typewriter, calls not on school time had to be made on pay phones and people paid by checks more than credit cards. Even a guy like me who was a senior in high school in 1988 thought that not seeing a cell phone was awkward, until I remembered this was a 1988 story. I am kind of glad they glossed over Challenger though as you know it was on a lot of people's minds back then. But based on my own recollection of my camp experience, this movie probably conveyed more closely what Space Camp was like than the 1986 movie. They certainly had some help in getting one of those white three ring binders with the black and red "SPACE CAMP" artwork on it for the prop guys to make replicas of. THOSE took me back as I still have my camp binder and I use it to this day as it has a shuttle program press guide in it (and it still has stuff in it that I have yet to find on the web).

Sure there were some things glossed over and made a little artificial, but I can remember the exercise in the morning and getting crammed with activities in a given day to the point where you were pretty tired at the end. My class even had its own blow up when one of the campers didn't want to be there anymore and had to get coached back by a counselor. Even a place as great as Space Camp is not going to be perfect all the time. Too bad we never got a chance to design our own mission patch though as I know with my artistic talent, I could have drawn up a cool one.

I am curious to know if that one student was REALLY good enough to build a Monogram 1/72 shuttle stack that well in only a day though. I know the kit was available through the Young Astronauts series back then, but it is not one of the easiest models to assemble. Whomever built it for the film did a nice and clean job with it. If the original was done that well, more power to him!

The DVD is apparently for sale at Hallmark stores now (or soon will be). I plan to pick up a copy and I hope it has some behind the scenes documentaries on it because I would like to see how they filmed it and maybe get a retrospective on the original group of kids that went. Considering many of the actors they had in the film were suffering from learning disabilities like the people they portrayed, they did a good job. And, they got a chance to go to Space Camp as well. How cool is THAT!

There is one thing I am most grateful for, the fact that they had no celebrity astronaut appearance. So Buzz Aldrin didn't come stepping out from behind a curtain to say "hey kids, welcome to Space Camp!" To me that would have been a cop out. The story focused on the teacher and the kids themselves and their experience. So many other projects involving kids and/or space seem to go for the hook of putting somebody famous in to attract viewers. It can work, but it can also backfire. So kudos to the production team for not going for the "cheap" way out (even though celebrity appearances by astronauts tend not to be cheap depending on who one gets). They also downplayed the NASA angle as I only saw one "Marshall Space Flight Center" sign at the camp where it should not have been and having a "Colonel" in charge. Space Camp is its own entity after all, with some help from NASA in terms of allowing the tours and access to some hardware, but not a part of it.

posted 02-01-2012 09:58 AM               

I would say if you are a Space Camp alum, especially from the 1980s or early 1990s, this one will give you a nice trip down memory lane as my own camp experiences flooded back somewhat as I read the book. It was nice to take a glimpse at what things were similar and what things had changed, even four years after my camp experience.

posted 02-01-2012 09:40 PM               

I never got to go to Space Camp (growing up with overprotective parents who didn't have much money pretty much assured that would never happen when I was a kid) so this movie won't have exactly the same impact to me as it does to others here. I've also never been to the area, so I won't be distracted by the, "Hey, THAT wasn't like that back then," moments other must have had.

posted 02-03-2012 11:42 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by p51:
I never got to go to Space Camp (growing up with overprotective parents who didn't have much money pretty much assured that would never happen when I was a kid) so this movie won't have exactly the same impact to me as it does to others here.

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You realize you can go as an adult for three days, right?

Even though it was only one trip for me as a kid, I would love to give it another whirl. Even Mike talks about in his book how competative several of the adults were when he went through a teachers version of the camp about 8 months before he took the kids through it.

posted 02-05-2012 12:16 AM               

I don't know much about the camp in the 80s, but they had the light blue flight suits then and wasn't the camp patch different then as well? I have a 80s Space Camp flightsuit in my collection and the patches were different. I also noticed the Aviation Challenege logos, and I'm certain that wasn't being used at the time (a co-worker went through that two years ago).

quote:

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Originally posted by Jay Chladek:
You realize you can go as an adult for three days, right?

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posted 02-05-2012 03:40 AM               

Now the kind I have has the old square rectangular Alabama Space and Rocket Center Patch and a black patch with "Space Camp" in big red letters. This is the style that we saw Christa McAuliffe wear on some of her early parades after her selection (some of the Teacher in Space candidates went through Space Camp with the instructors I had about 5 weeks after I left, I don't know if she was there). When the movie came out in the summer of 1986, the flight suits as I understand it altered a little to more closely match what the stars wore in the film. This is also when the Space Camp logo changed from the big red letters to the round red, white and blue patch with the shuttle on it that we still see today. If you watched the film through the picture taking at the end, you would have seen a picture showing the original camp class photo and they were wearing the sky blue flight suits.