26th October, 2011.
Houston.

Got up at about 7 AM. Well I could only get up because I slept at about 7 the previous night. So that is one nice sleep. When I got up Alan had aldready gone and Abel was ready to go. ( Scara Uncle’ sons ). After having pancakes for breakfast, and saying goodbye to Linksy Aunty, we left the place. On the way, we went to Academy Sports Store to pick up some biking equipment for me to take back to India. Uncle left me at Walmart where all the other students were.

Walmart is otherworldly. You walk through a set of doors… and enter Paradise. Atleast for people like me, who love eating loads of tiny food items. Most of the stuff is cheap but amazing. I bought quite a few things for my ‘tiny’ little sweet tooth.

After checking out, we went back to the hotel room. After dumping our stuff there we went to a nearby All American Buffet, the Golden Corral. This is terrible! I have run out of words to describe America, or the food, or anything! I will have to start repeating my usage of adjectives. Alright, the food was amazing. I mean, I truly mean it. There was burgers, pizzas,pastas, nuggets, prawns, shrimps, noodles, ice cream softie machine, marshmallows, strawberries,various fruits and the most mind boggling of them all, a chocolate fountain. And people, mind you, all of this is only the food types that i have eaten, there were many more types of food there which I didn’t even see. The vast array of food on display was mindboggling.

Then, we went back to the hotel and boarded the bus to Johnson Space Center, Houston. Yes, we were finally going to the most awaited place of this trip.

It took us about an hour to reach the place. We stopped at the main entrance where there were a few mock modules of the machines that NASA had built. Loads of pictures. Started going inside finally and entered the Center. It is huge, colorfull and beautiful.

We were ushered into a room with quite a few tables and chairs. We were made to sit group-wise as it was a team activity. The instructor asked us a few extremely basic questions about aerodynamics, showed us a few bottles and strips of laminated paper and then told us to build a rocket using the properties of air and water pressure and which should be truly aerodynamic. That, is called challenging. We rushed to get our supplies and got to work pronto.

The rocket launching went real smooth. It went quite well for the groups, particularly ours, whose rocket was pretty decent.

We then went to another room. Something like a conference room, which had a projector and a place to stand and talk. One of the instructors took this session. The whole basis of the session was combustion in micro gravity. In this session I learnt two really important things about space about which I had a terrible misconception about before. One was that there is gravity in space, in very minute amounts thus space does not posses zero gravity, but micro gravity. I always thought otherwise till now. The second really surprised me. I, since a small kid had studied that humans cannot live in space like we do on Earth because there is no life giving oxygen present over there. Now, I learnt that there IS oxygen in air, minute amounts, not enough to support human life, but enough to support combustion. I really loved this session.

Tired after the long day, we quickly went through dinner and dunked ourselves into the bed.

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