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

This was the week all our work had been building toward—the annual mission, this one to Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. 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 spend 120 hours straight living in the habitat we had built, subsisting off microwave food, doing their scheduled experiments and exploring Titan’s surface, while the rest of us manned mission control and occasionally snuck off to stage the next comet storm or engine failure.¹

I’m sure the astronauts could give you a more 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 were miles and miles away from Copernicus, I really only have two moments 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 of Reach for the Top (#113, #62, #11, #10, #1), and Nigel was one of our key players.² In hindsight, even that wasn’t necessary: we were so laughably better than everybody else that we would’ve 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 time, we annihilated the competition. So, that was pretty fun.

That afternoon, Nigel was safely back in Saturn’s orbit, while I was manning Mission Control as an excuse not to go to History class³. Nearby, Jake Carter, our star Reach player (#63), was focused intently on a game of SimTower instead of reviewing mission logs. Then the fire alarm went 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. When the alarm kept going, Jake and I finally ran outside, figuring the astronauts would abandon mission integrity if and when they decided the building might actually be on fire.

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. Nobody seems to know what triggered the alarm, and I don’t think we ever got 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 me refusing to acknowledge that the astronauts who were supposedly hundreds of millions of miles away were standing ten feet from us.

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.

I also somehow fronted the entire $400 grocery bill for the five astronauts the night before the mission, despite having worked only four hours a week at near-minimum wage for just over a year. I did eventually get paid back, but to this day I have no idea what possessed me to empty most of my bank account for food I wasn’t going to eat—or how nobody’s parents stepped in first.
Sean S. was also on the team, but as mission commander—and a more peripheral player—he denied himself special EVA privileges.
Between Mission Control and Reach, I missed a remarkable amount of school that week for someone contributing as little as I was. Another ridiculous thing I’m surprised I got away with.