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Chips with a Hint of Space

Written by Ryan Faricelli on . Posted in Alumni, Mission Updates. No Comments on Chips with a Hint of Space

Space Camp Hall-of-Famer Danny Jaques is a teacher, leader, and lover of space … but what you may know him from most is his one-of-a-kind salsa. 

The creator of Danny’s Rocket Ranch Space Salsa, Jaques mixes every single bag of salsa himself, producing 250-300 bags of salsa a day by “doing it the old-fashioned way.”

“You may have heard of tennis elbow, I like to tell people that making this salsa has given me salsa shoulder,” laughed Jaques.

During his time with us on the Dare to Explore Podcast, Danny Jaques even shared a bit about what makes his Space Salsa so special – down to the tomato. 

“Freeze-dried tomato, when it stays in the fridge overnight, ends up having a stronger taste and more robust flavor,” explained Jaques. “In fact, the flavor ends up being great, not just on chips, but that taste allows it to be mixed with ground beef, ground pork, and so on.”

His favorite recipe? Believe it or not, it’s one of the simplest in the world – even for a salsa that is anything but simple. 

“Take a three-pound pork loin, put it in a crock-pot, and mix in a couple of bags of the Space Salsa … cover it up, and then put it on slow-cook for about five hours. At the end of the five hours, you pull the pork apart, let it absorb the liquids, and you’ve got the best pulled pork EVER. It’s just fantastic.” said the Space Salsa creator. 

Learn more about Jaques and other scientists, engineers, and professionals from the space and aeronautics field by subscribing to “Dare to Explore,” the official podcast of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center Foundation. “Dare to Explore” can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else you listen.

The Sound of Space…

Written by Ryan Faricelli on . Posted in Mission Updates. No Comments on The Sound of Space…

Drummer for Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson, Rock & Roll Hall-of-Fame inductee, Grammy Award winner and friend of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center Education Foundation.

Chris Vrenna’s career has been anything but standard mission protocol. 

Vrenna joined our podcast Dare to Explore to talk about music, space, and how a meaningful, committed mission can bridge the gap between industries, between dreams, and even build another stop at the intersection of arts and science. 

Even with this incredible, far-reaching career, Vrenna wanted to talk to us most about the things he says he can’t do. 

“One of the movies that’s been on cable constantly for years is The Martian, and it’s all rooted in very real technology,” said Vrenna. “It’s crazy how in it he goes and finds the old Mars Rover and fires it up, simply because the batteries have died, which is really one of the only ways they stop functioning, and through that figures out how to communicate back to Earth.”

“It’s so cool to me that we have this technology,” continued Vrenna. “I’m fascinated by things I don’t understand and things I can’t do, and [communication through space] is the biggest one of them all. When James Webb started sending pictures, didn’t we all just sit there looking at the first images? It looked like a poster straight out of the 70s – just phenomenal. 

Vrenna showed this love of discovery and learning when he talked to us about education. He spoke on the virtue of knowledge, and how knowledge is worth acquiring for the sake of knowledge. That knowledge doesn’t need a reason. 

“Sometimes, learning is just about learning,” said Vrenna. “If we don’t support that, how are we supposed to have a productive society.” 

This passion for education is perhaps most shown off in Vrenna’s newest mission: teaching. After a second torn rotator cuff from his music career, Vrenna knew it was time to lean into his other life-long love – discovery. Since 2018, he has been a professor right here in Huntsville, Alabama, helping to show the next generation of artists, scientists and citizens that sometimes, you don’t have to choose one path or another. Sometimes, it’s okay to discover them all. 

Learn more about Vrenna and other scientists, engineers, and professionals from the space and aeronautics field by subscribing to “Dare to Explore,” the official podcast of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center Foundation. “Dare to Explore” can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else you listen.

Star Trek display from the Rocket Center

Space to Input

Written by Ryan Faricelli on . Posted in Alumni, Mission Updates. No Comments on Space to Input

Husband and wife duo Michael and Denise Okuda have worked in science fiction television for more than three decades as graphic designers, artists and technical consultants. Together, they have worked on six Star Trek films, as well as Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise, Picard, and even writing the Star Trek Encyclopedia.

Michael has also designed several NASA mission patches, including the STS-125 mission of Space Shuttle Atlantis, which repaired the Hubble Space Telescope. He and his wife are currently technical advisors for the Netflix series Space Force and the Apple TV series For All Mankind.

“We review scripts and rough cuts,” said Denise of their work on For All Mankind. “When needed we go into the studio to be there on set to help the actors push the right button in the LEM, and also be there for the director and the writers if there are any other questions.”

“A writer would say, ‘at this point, we want this to break,” explained Michael about the role of a technical consultant for Star Trek. “How can we do that so that it can’t be fixed until the fourth act? You work with the writers and try to help them tell the story in a way that’s as interesting as possible.”

Michael is perhaps most famous for a design that many television viewers may not realize is his work. Star Trek: The Next Generation features a bold, purple and orange graphic style on the spaceship computer displays and controls. These were designed by Michael.

“They’re what’s become known as the LCARS style,” Michael notes. “It became part of the look of the era, and I’m very proud of that.”

“We all took a lot of pride in doing the work as professionally as we could, but also enjoying it” added Denise about their television work. “Thinking about all those twelve-year-old kids out there and what the shows that we were working on would mean to them – as much as when Mike and I were kids and we were watching [Star Trek] the original series.

Learn more about the Okudas and other professionals, scientists, and engineers from  space and aeronautics history by subscribing to “Dare to Explore,” the official podcast of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center Foundation. “Dare to Explore” can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else you listen.

Margrit von Braun Margrit von Braun

An Animated Childhood

Written by Ryan Faricelli on . Posted in Alumni, Mission Updates. No Comments on An Animated Childhood

Margrit von Braun is an environmental engineer specializing in hazardous waste management and risk assessment. She was one of the first women to join the University of Idaho College of Engineering faculty in 1980,and served as their Dean of the College of Graduate Studies.

Margrit’s father was Dr. Wernher von Braun, the first director of the Marshall Space Flight Center who led the development of the Saturn V rocket that sent the Apollo astronauts to the moon. Dr. von Braun was also instrumental in the public relations efforts to convince the American people that efforts in space were possible and important. To do so, he partnered with Walt Disney and appeared on several episodes of The Wonderful World of Disney.

“My sister and I each got to meet Disney,” Margrit shared. “He was such a creative guy, and he was very interested in space and interested in helping my father figure out how to tell the story with animation and with models in ways that had not been done before. That was a great collaboration.”

Though the effects of Dr. von Braun’s celebrity status did impact Margrit’s life growing up, her parents always made sure their family life felt like any other family’s circumstances.

Margrit recalls learning to roller skate down the long, empty hallways at Marshall Space Flight Center on the weekends when her father had work to do there.

“I think I grew up pretty normally,” remembered Margrit. “I guess it wasn’t until much later that I realized that having astronauts at your dinner table wasn’t something everybody did. As a kid, I don’t think you really notice that, and we weren’t really encouraged to feel special.”

Learn more about Margrit von Braun and other professionals, scientists, and engineers from aeronautic and space history by subscribing to “Dare to Explore,” the official podcast of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center Foundation. “Dare to Explore” can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else you listen.

The Old Faithful Joy of Discovery

Written by rlauvlhm-ca on . Posted in Alumni, Mission Updates. No Comments on The Old Faithful Joy of Discovery

Dorothy “Dottie” Metcalf-Lindenberger is best known for her work as an American astronaut, becoming the very first Space Camp® alumna to fulfill this dream that so many campers have as they walk through the doors for the very first time. However, her love of exploration began far before she had her sights forever locked on the stars. 

When she was in college, Metcalf-Lindenberger joined her classmates on an expedition to Yellowstone National Park, where she spent five full weeks mapping where the last ice sheet had been, resulting in a depression of the valley glaciers. 

However, even in this time with her feet firmly planted on earth, her heart was always drifting towards the sky. 

“Of course, we would go up to Bear Tooth, around 10,000 feet above sea level, and watch satellites,” said Metcalf-Lindenberger on the Dare to Explore Podcast. “It was a really magical summer … the nearest phone was a payphone a mile away, so if you even wanted to make a call you had to walk a mile to do it. I really cherished that summer.”

In fact, she loved it so much that the following summer Metcalf-Lindenberger was back exploring the mountains, this time outside of Colorado Springs, Colorado. Her mission? She was looking at 2.5 billion-year-old rocks, and discovering how tiny micro-continents were smashed onto the part of the main continent of North America. 

“Looking at how these rocks are deformed, three are different crystallizations, and you can see how these formations have been re-heated,” remembered Metcalf-Lindenberger. “I turned that into my senior thesis project, [and I received] honors in geology as I graduated that year.”

Not to be limited to scientific discoveries, Metcalf-Lindenberger also has delved into the world of artist-discovery for quite some time. For years, she has served as a lead singer of the all-astronaut rock band “Max Q,” a musical group that she shares with other space legends such as Daniel Burbank, Kevin Ford, Susan Helms and Greg Johnson.

Learn more about Metcalf-Lindenberger and other scientists, engineers, and professionals from the space and aeronautics field by subscribing to “Dare to Explore,” the official podcast of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center Foundation. “Dare to Explore” can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else you listen.

Photo Credit: NASA

New Exhibit Open – Dare to Explore: Frontiers of Space

Written by Britain Meithe on . Posted in Mission Updates. No Comments on New Exhibit Open – Dare to Explore: Frontiers of Space

Dare to Explore: Frontiers of Space is a new and evolving exhibit showcasing current and future technologies of space exploration, such as a 1/10th scale model of ULA’s Vulcan rocket, Boeing’s Starliner Pressure Capsule test vessel, a 1/10th scale model of NASA’s SLS rocket, Blue Origin’s Mannequin Skywalker, and coming soon, Chris Sembroski’s Inspiration4 SpaceX launch and entry suit.

The Vulcan heavy-lift rocket is manufactured in nearby Decatur, and the pressure vessel is the skeleton of the reusable Crew Space Transportation Starliner module that will take crews to lower-Earth-orbit locations such as the International Space Station.

World Space Week Sponsors at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center

Written by Diana Hughes on . Posted in Alumni, Mission Updates. No Comments on World Space Week Sponsors at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center

Thank you to our partners that sponsored World Space Week activities:

 

 

The U.S. Space & Rocket Center celebrated World Space Week with a variety of activities throughout the museum during the week. We appreciate our sponsors for the week for helping to make an outstanding educational and entertaining experience for all!

Find out more information about our groundbreaking that took place during World Space Week on the all new Space Camp Operations Center here.