by Erin Teagan
It was nearly impossible to grab anything out of my supply box while wearing the giant gloves. I changed my strategy and took it slow, taking out one tile at a time and finding its place on the board. It was even more difficult squirting a dollop of foam onto the metal tray before fixing the tile into place, but soon I got a good system down and I picked up my pace.
It was hard work and even harder being so sweaty-hot and floating all over the place in my harness. I pulled out another tile, not even looking at the size, and measured it up against the spots on my tray. It would fit the one all the way in the corner. The hardest one to reach.
“That’s one minute already,” Alex said.
I pulled my body across the tray, holding the foam under my arm and the tile in my hand. With my free hand, I squirted a bit of foam and pushed the tile into place. Seven more to go. I stuffed the foam back under an arm and pulled out another tile, making sure to shut the top of the box tight so nothing floated away. I was finally making good progress when James dropped his foam.
“Oh no,” he said through the headset.
Not to mention he only had placed five tiles.
“Two minutes,” Alex said.
I handed James my foam. “Use it and pass it back.”
He looked surprised but then grabbed it without wasting any more time. And, actually, it was easier for me to retrieve a tile and find its place on the tray without being afraid I’d lose the foam dispenser from under my arm.
“Foam, please,” I said, and James handed it back.
And then when I was finished, I handed it back to him, and we repeated the process until I had placed all of my tiles and I didn’t need it back again.
“Time!” Alex called, clicking his stopwatch.
“You placed all your tiles, Luciana. Well done.” He grinned and gave me a thumbs-up.
“Yes!” I tried giving him two thumbs-up because I was doubly excited at my time, but my body swung out of control and I crashed into the ISS again.
Alex laughed and pulled me down.
“Finished! Got them all in, too,” I heard James say through my headset as I tore off my space suit.
“Looks like we have our team captains,” Alex said.
James gave me a high five when he got back to the ground, my bare hand to his gloved hand. “Thanks for helping me up there.”
“Sure,” I said, surprised again because this didn’t seem like the same James who had been fighting with Ella all afternoon.
“Hope you’re as good at building robots as you are putting tiles onto a metal tray.” He kicked off his lunar overshoes.
“Sure am,” I said, even though I wasn’t totally sure I was so good at building robots. I had only built one or two before. For fun. With Raelyn.
James pulled off his helmet, smirking. “Doubt it.”
And the James from before was back.
“You’ll see,” I said, and then I walked off, leaving him there.
Before dinner, James and I—the official captains—picked our teams. There were six teams in our age bracket participating in the robotics challenge at Space Camp and according to Alex and Mallory, competition was going to be fierce.
“I’m glad our team is just everyone in our sleeping station,” Meg said, popping a meatball into her mouth.
I eyed James and his team across the dining hall. Noah adjusted his glasses and stuck his tongue out at me.
“I’m just glad James is not on my team,” I said, and Ella groaned.
“Bunk versus bunk is so stupid,” she said, the sandwich in front of her untouched. She probably wanted to be on James’s team so they could form some kind of super-robotics squad. “Did you even read about the robotics competition in the orientation packet they sent us?”
I had not.
“Because there are a lot of rules and also details that a captain should know about and—”
“Ella. Stop,” Charlotte said.
But she didn’t stop. “What about the bolt system, do you know how that works? Do you know that you have to earn bolts to even build a robot? And what about sponsorships? Do you know about those? And—ow!”
“Sorry,” Charlotte said. “You deserved that pinch. Luci is captain and I think she’ll do a great job and you just need to stop it, please.”
My heart was pounding because, pretty much, I didn’t know all of those things that Ella was talking about. The orientation stuff was still on my desk at home. Barely touched.
“We need a team name,” Meg said, slurping her star soup. “Something like the Sparkle Unicorns”—she wiped soup off her face—“or the Space Kittens?” She bounced in her seat. “And we can all put purple stripes in our hair!”
“That would be so cool,” I said, ignoring Ella’s grimace. “What about Glitter and Gears?”
Johanna ran up to the table with her second helping. “I think we have this in Germany, käse Spätzle? Little tubey things with cheesy sauce all over them?”
“Macaroni and cheese?” Meg said.
“Yes, yes. Macaroni and cheese!” She squeezed in next to me and took a big forkful.
“I really like all your ideas way better than my sister’s team name, which was the Sprinkled Donuts.” Charlotte bit into a French fry. “That was her favorite food by the way, and my favorite food is chicken pot pie but no way do I want chicken in our team name.”
“My soccer team in Germany is called the Wild Cats,” Johanna said. “I kind of like that name.”
Ella sighed. “That has nothing to do with science.”
“How about the Red Rovers?” Charlotte said.
“Oh! Like the game and also like the red planet!” I said. “I love it!”
“That’s the best one,” Johanna agreed, with a fork pointed at Charlotte.
“What about Team Robotics?” Ella suggested, playing with the little flag toothpick of a rocket in her turkey sandwich. “Clear and simple.”
“Okay. We have a lot of good names. Let’s vote,” I said, proud of myself for sounding like such a great captain. See? You didn’t have to read a thousand pamphlets to be a good leader. “Raise your hand for Sparkle Unicorns.” Nobody raised her hand.
Meg blew air out of her mouth. “Figures. Nobody ever likes my ideas.”
“Space Kittens?” I said and Meg raised her hand. “Glitter and Gears?” No takers. “Wild Cats?” Not even Johanna raised her hand. “Red Rovers?” Three hands popped up. “And, lastly, Team Robotics.” Ella raised her hand.
Charlotte clapped and stood up because it was obvious her team name, Red Rovers, was the winner.
Ella snapped her rocket toothpick in half and Charlotte looked at her with disapproval, taking the jagged pieces away from her. I glanced at Meg, remembering what she’d said about Ella not having any friends, and even though Ella wasn’t the most pleasant person in the world, it made me feel a little sad for her.
After dinner, we headed to the robotics lab, on the first level in the same building, not too far from the crew galley. We could see it from way down the hall, Orion leading the way, the oversized red plastic brick walls separating the lab from the rest of Space Camp. Over the door was a row of framed pictures of previous winning robotics teams holding up patches that said “Best Rover.” I stopped for a good look, because it was like a wall of fame just for the robotics lab. And maybe it wasn’t the same as getting on the wall in the common area with all the real-life astronauts who used to be Space Campers, but it was still a wall of fame. And I wanted to be on it.
Johanna pulled me into the lab and we all took a seat, Ella at the tip-top of the table like she was in charge. And to make matters worse, we shared our lab time with James’s team, the RoboEngineers. The other four teams met at different times during the day.
“Welcome to the Space Camp Robotics Lab,” a guy with a white lab coat said. “I am Leo, your robotics crew trainer.”
“What’s that?” James interrupted, pointing to a sensor high up on a shelf, sitting on top of a minipodium made o
ut of building bricks. There was a tag hanging off it that said, “10,000,000 BOLTS.”
Leo smiled. “That is the coveted gyro sensor. The most expensive part in the lab and also probably the most valuable for our competition table.”
“How do we get it?” James asked, and Ella rolled her eyes.
“You need to earn it,” Leo said with a smile. “I’ll get to that in a bit.”
“Why do we want that?” I whispered to Johanna.
“It’s for a balancing robot,” Johanna whispered back. “Like, you could make a robot with one wheel and it wouldn’t tip over.”
Leo moved in front of a big square table in the middle of the room. It was a tournament table for a robot competition, which I knew from looking over Ella’s shoulder as she’d read her logbook while standing in line for the bathroom. “This is the table we’ll use in the competition on Thursday. You’ll have all week to build your robot.”
I scanned the table and took note of everything our robot would have to work with, around, or through: a mountain made out of dust and rocks, something that looked like a space tower, and a bunch of colored balls rolling around. In the middle was a flag that said, “MARS MISSION 2.0.”
“This is the scenario: You are a team of astronauts who have been selected to go to Mars, but you’ll need to build a capable rover to go with you. Your rover must take a Mars rock sample and place it in a Mars Ascent Vehicle for launch to orbit. There are four stages.” Leo pointed to the balls rolling around on the table. “First, identify the sample, which in this competition will be the red rocks only, or the red balls.” He picked a ball up and threw it to James. He caught it perfectly, of course. “Second stage is to collect the ball, third stage is to break the ball open and retrieve the smaller sample inside.” He squeezed the ball hard, cracking it open and pulling out a marble. “Last and final stage is to bring your sample to the space elevator and send it into orbit, where it will be picked up by a capsule at a later date.” The elevator sat at the top of the dirt mountain and was made out of building bricks. I could see why you needed a robot that wouldn’t tip over.
“How do you win?” Noah asked.
“Did anyone read the orientation material?” Ella sighed. “The team with the most bolts at the end of the competition wins.”
“Thank you, Miss,” Leo said to Ella. “Are you all familiar with the bolt system?” Everyone nodded their heads except for me. “It’s our point system. On Thursday, your robots will be judged by how many stations they complete on the table and how fast. The more stations your robot completes in the least time, the more bolts you’ll earn.”
Leo clapped his hands. “The catch is that each part you use on your robot costs bolts. So, in order to build a supercool robot for the competition, you have to first earn bolts. You can do this in two ways.” He held up a finger. “One: Complete the daily lab challenges for bolts.” He held up a second finger. “Two: Find a sponsor.”
“What are sponsors?” I whispered to Johanna, supersecret so Ella didn’t hear, but Johanna was too busy reading the challenge for the day on the board to answer.
“Today your challenge is to build a simple rover that responds to a remote control by moving forward, backward, and in a circle,” Leo said. “No programming required. Just a basic exercise to get you started in the lab.”
“I could make that robot in my sleep,” James said to his team.
Ella stood up, glaring at James. “Can we start already?”
Leo laughed, glancing at Mallory and Alex, who, if you asked me, were looking pretty exhausted over the Ella and James situation.
“Today’s challenge is worth one million bolts. If you need a refresher of the rules, check out the poster on the wall by the rover parts; otherwise, go ahead and get started.”
James and Ella fast-walked to the parts wall, elbowing each other.
“Hmph,” Charlotte said. “What’s a robot without programming?”
“We’ll need an infrared sensor to link to a remote control,” Johanna said, mostly talking to herself and shuffling over to the parts wall.
“Can we make a puppy like Orion?” Meg asked.
Ella came back to the table with a few parts she had collected. “No, Meg. We have to keep it simple.”
“Infrared sensor!” Johanna was back at our table, waving the sensor around.
“Great,” Ella said, grabbing it. “This is all we really need.” She spread out the parts in front of us, and my stomach tightened because I was basically letting her take this whole thing over. “What do you guys think? Clean and simple.”
The rest of the team nodded, already building.
“Kind of boring, though,” I said, and that’s when I got my idea.
I left the team to explore the robot parts in the bins along the wall—building bricks, beams, connectors, and axles to make wheel sets—looking for just the right part. In the last container, on the very bottom of the wall of parts, there was a bin of LED lights. I was an expert at making things with LED lights because we made light-up bracelets last summer in Maker Camp. I grabbed a bunch of bricks, some lights, and a battery. I couldn’t wait to surprise the rest of the Red Rovers.
I was still building when the teams started lining up to show off their creations. Everyone’s looked the same, pretty much. Four wheels attached to a battery pack attached to an infrared sensor that would make it run by remote control. Boring. Boring. Boring. I ran to join my team just as Ella placed our rover in the taped-off arena on the floor.
“Wait!” I said, and I attached my part to the top of the robot and turned on the battery. “RED ROVERS” lit up in neon LED lights, flashing and pulsing.
“Ohhhhhhh,” Meg said.
“Spitze!” Johanna said, which I remembered meant awesome.
“No!” Ella said, and she tried to grab the rover back from the floor, but it was too late. Meg pressed the remote control and it raced off. I mean, was Ella trying to destroy my creation? In case she didn’t know, it was more than just her on this team. Anyway she’d thank me later when we won a thousand-million bolts for creative thinking.
“They deduct bolts based on the weight of your rover, Luciana,” Ella said, “not to mention each part has a cost too.” And our team kind of got silent, all except for Meg, who was showing the rest of the groups how well our rover spun and rolled backward.
“Weight?” I said, panic filling my stomach.
“Did you even read about the bolt system for challenge robots like they told us to?” Ella said, her face red. “Did you even ask the rest of the team?”
Charlotte stepped between us. “Ella. It’s okay, guys. It was just a mistake.”
But it was more than just a mistake, and based on the look on my teammates’ faces, they knew it too. Just the battery alone weighed almost as much as the rest of the robot. What had I done? Why hadn’t I just taken a second to read the directions over by the part wall?
Ella fumed. “How are we going to afford to buy parts for the competition robot now?”
Charlotte tried to calm her down. “It’s okay. We’ll earn a bunch of bolts over the week. We’ll make it up.”
But when we weighed our robot, it became obvious that it was going to take more than just a bunch of bolts. Because at the end of it, even though our robot did great at the challenge, we were still at negative two million bolts. The Red Rovers were in last place, by a lot, all thanks to me.
That night, everyone met in the habitat common area to watch a movie about Jupiter. I just kind of stood there while the rest of my team picked out some cushions and took a seat on the floor, nobody really talking.
Except for Charlotte. She talked for all of us. “… and then my sister was in the hall where they keep the stuffed monkeys and all of the lights went out, like—BAM!—complete and total darkness and if it hadn’t been for her really good sense of direction, my sister would have never made it out of Space Camp alive and—”
“That hall that is very dark and creepy?”
Meg said, checking behind her. “Stuffed monkeys?”
“Yes, like this—” And Charlotte did an impression of the stuffed monkeys she was talking about. “Also I’m pretty sure the real and actual grave of one of the original monkeys in space is here.”
Meg stood up. “Like right here in this very spot?”
“No,” Ella said. “That’s a lie. There are no stuffed monkeys, Charlotte, and also they planted a garden in the monkeys’ memory.”
“I know,” Charlotte said, whispering, “because they stuffed the body and put it in there.” She pointed down the dark hallway of artifacts on the other side of the room.
“Actually,” Charlotte continued. “Miss Baker, one of the Monkeynauts who flew in space, lived at the Rocket Center until she was twenty-six. She is buried on the grounds of the center.”
Meg whimpered and grabbed Ella.
“It’s not true, Meg, there are no monkeys anywhere at Space Camp.”
“Or are there?” Charlotte said, grinning.
James kept looking over at us and smirking until I finally blew the hair out of my face and said, “WHAT?”
“Oh, me?” He looked around like he had no idea I was talking to him. “I just hope you guys weren’t planning on buying the gyro sensor, because we already have five million bolts.”
Ella stood back up. “Your score was less than one million bolts after they weighed your robot from the challenge.”
“Oh,” James said, smiling. “That was before we got sponsored.”
“Sponsored?” I said.
The lights dimmed and kids settled onto their pillows, the movie just about to start.
“Sponsored,” James repeated like he was bored. “It’s when someone on the staff really likes your robot idea and they give you a bunch of bolts—”
“We know what it means, thank you very much,” Ella said, even though he was talking to me. “Who in their right mind would sponsor a team like yours?”
“Ella,” Charlotte said, quietly. “Be nice. Sit down.”
The movie started with a crash of music and a close-up of the planet Jupiter, making us all jump. Ella sat down next to Meg and Johanna returned to her cushion, James sliding back over to his team. Charlotte pulled out gumballs from her pocket. “I brought them from home and don’t worry my pocket is clean—”