Book a space flight for just $5 at the Space Science Center in Columbus

Soon you won’t have to be an astronaut to see what going into space is like.

Five dollars will cover it Saturday when Columbus’ Coca-Cola Space Science Center opens its new Odyssey space shuttle simulator in which up to 27 people take off to rendezvous with the International Space Station.

The ride begins with the blast off as booster rockets take the craft from zero to 17,100 mph in 8 minutes, before the shuttle settles into orbit 250 miles up.

Passengers are seated in the cargo bay, where skylights open so they can see the Earth and stars. They’ll dock with the space station before they have an action-adventure that space science center director Shawn Cruzen declines to divulge, lest he ruin it for them.

He said the concept is based on an old NASA idea to use a space station as a staging point for missions to the moon or to Mars, with the shuttle a connecting flight for up to 70 astronauts seated in the cargo bay.

The Odyssey simulator is sponsored by $250,000 from WestRock.

What passengers see on multiple screens during the 15-minute trip are various angles of shuttle launches from NASA file footage and high-resolution images from the Hubble space telescope, which would not exist, nor work, without the 30-year shuttle program.

The orbiting telescope that opened the universe to human eyes was built to fit in the shuttle bay, from which it was eased into orbit. Later when the optics didn’t work, the shuttle took a repair crew to fix it.

The Hubble gave humanity an epiphany when researchers pointed it at a blank spot in the universe, and discovered that what appeared vacant was not empty, but filled with distant stars and galaxies. The famous image is known as the Hubble Deep Field.

Open to researchers’ use, the Hubble remains oversubscribed by a 10 to 1 margin, Cruzen said.

The shuttle program also built the International Space Station, which conducts research that can’t be done anywhere else. For example, extracted cancer cells exposed to gravity won’t grow in a ground-based laboratory the way they do inside the body, Cruzen said. But they will on the space station.

From 1981 to 2011, NASA launched 133 successful shuttle missions, but people most remember the two losses: Columbia, which broke up on re-entry Feb. 1, 2003, killing seven; and Challenger, which blew apart during its launch Jan. 28, 1986. Among the seven Challenger crew members killed was Christa McAuliffe, who was to be the first teacher in space.

The following April, the crew’s families decided to create the Challenger Center for Space Science Education, establishing a network of facilities “where children, teachers and citizens can touch the future: manipulate equipment, conduct experiments, solve problems, and work together, immersing themselves in space-like surroundings.”

Columbus State University’s Coca-Cola Space Science Center opened in 1996. It gets about 40,000 guests a year, most of them students. On Wednesday, 19 people who bussed in from Redan, Ga., were on a day-trip.

Dutch Cummings, who’s in charge of visitor services, said the center serves team-building groups from companies such as Aflac and TSYS, church field trips, senior associations and home-schoolers, plus the area public school students who regularly visit.

Its new Odyssey shuttle trip that opens to the public 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday has been hosting groups since March 1. Cruzen asked that any groups coming Saturday make reservations. The center has a link for that on its Facebook page, but Cummings said the best way to reserve space is call 706-649-1477.

Other features of Saturday’s event are science experiments, air rockets and a robot named “Red,” a 2-foot-tall humanoid capable of face recognition, color sensing and 26 “degrees of freedom” or individual motions. It is partly remote-controlled, but has autonomous features, Cruzen said.

With the shuttle program over, NASA is working on a vehicle that’s more like an old-school space capsule, to be propelled into orbit by the same rocket boosters the shuttle used, Cruzen said. Like Apollo moon mission capsules, it will parachute to its landing.

This story was originally published March 22, 2017 at 1:12 PM with the headline "Book a space flight for just $5 at the Space Science Center in Columbus."