#138. Extra-Vehicular Activity (Tuesday, April 4, 2006)

What was your best day of…pretending something was real when it was obviously not?

When I introduced the super one-of-a-kind, super-nerdy Space Simulation club in #96, I of course spent the whole story talking about the least interesting part (my part)—the Dewey-Decimal encoded inventory room. What about the actual “simulating space” part?

Well, this was the week of the year all our work was being directed towards—the annual mission, this one to Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, and one of the small handful of theoretical terraforming candidates if and when humans ever develop the technology. The crew consisted of Sean Stewart the commander (#96), along with Shawn De Vries the second-in-command, Sean Mitchell (yes, we made that joke many times), Jack Shandon the pilot, and my best friend Nigel Healey (#14, #1). They would spent 120 hours straight living in the (legit, but safety-lacking, #96) constructed habitat, subsisting off microwave food, doing their scheduled experiments and exploring the lunar surface, while the rest of us manned mission control—and a subset of us snuck off at varying times to simulate the next comet storm or engine failure that would befall these poor astronauts.

Side Note: One of the most ridiculous (but generous) things I ever did in my life was go to the grocery store with Nigel, Sean S., and Sean’s dad (#113) the night before the mission and fund the entirely of the five astronauts’ $400 five-day meal plan. Note my age at the time, and the fact that I had only been working four hours a week at near-minimum wage (at Kumon tutoring) for just over a year to that point. To this day, I still can’t recall: (1) what possessed me to essentially empty out my bank account for a ton of food I wasn’t going to eat, (2) why Sean M.’s dad couldn’t have paid for it, (3) how my parents never found out about this, (4) how they coordinated the paying-me-back among the five astronauts, and (5) whether I got any form of interest for my trouble.

I’m sure Nigel or one of the Shawn/Sean’s can give you an extremely vivid account of those five days from the inside. But as one of the peripheral mission control staff—whose main quartermaster duties had limited value when the astronauts where 800 miles away from Copernicus—I only have two accounts worth pulling out. The two Extra-Vehicular Activities.

An Extra-Vehicular Activity (EVA) is just the fancy NASA term for a spacewalk. And “special EVA” was the umbrella term we used for any instance where one of the astronauts had to leave the spacecraft temporarily—for reasons that were to be kept in the strictest confidence in the official mission log.

Generally, the members were serious enough about mission integrity that these “special EVAs” were very rare. Except, on this particular Tuesday morning, it was the preliminary city round for Reach for the Top (#113, #62, #11, #10, #1), and Nigel was one of our key players.¹ In hindsight, even that wasn’t necessary: we were so laughably better than everybody else that we would’ve 100% qualified for city finals anyways. But nonetheless, a decidedly non-space-related duty called, and Nigel answered.

And just like with the mission, I was kind of on the periphery for this Reach tournament (this was right before my big breakout at city finals, #11). Still, with the help of an astronaut who had travelled back to Earth in record of time, we annihilated the competition. So, that was pretty fun.

Then, that afternoon, with Nigel safely returned to Saturn’s orbit and me manning Mission Control as an excuse not to go to History class², and Jake Carter our star Reach player (#63) nearby, focused intently on a game of SimTower instead of reviewing mission logs, we suddenly hear the fire alarm go off. Not the fire alarm in the spaceship (which we had a device for), the actual fire alarm of the whole technical school building where our giant auto body shop was located.

At first, we thought we could wait it out. Then, it kept going, so Jake and I run out onto the street—figuring that the astronauts would come out when they did, their threshold for abandoning all semblance of mission integrity high enough to risk some real incendiary risk. (Our teacher advisor was at school teaching, and one of our alumni—now a college student at Carleton—was the designated adult representative there. And I believe that was his logic too.)

But then, about five minutes later, I see Nigel and the crew running out of the building themselves, fully dressed in their spacesuits of course. We’re all confused about what caused this fire drill—doesn’t seem like there’s an actual fire—and I don’t think any of us ever get an answer. We just look blankly past each other for the twenty minutes we’re forced to stay outside (in the cold Ottawa early spring), with Jake and I refusing to acknowledge—for the second time today—the tangible person objects in the nearby space.

In the span of one missed school day, Nigel set the record for interdimensional space travel, while I did practically nothing and loved every minute of it.

1. Shawn S. was also on the team. But being the mission commander and a more peripheral player, he denied himself special EVA privileges.
2. Between all the time in mission control and the Reach tournament, I really missed a lot of school that week for not-very-good reasons (given my contributions). Another ridiculous thing I’m surprised I got away with.