The Final Frontier

Space: the final frontier.  These are the voyages of the starship Voyager.  Its two and a half our mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.

It all began with a fire drill.  So innocently boring.  An interruption to the workday.  Outside the building, waiting for the all clear, three chemists conceived an idea: 

Let's prove to the world just how nerdy we really are. 

And so begins the tale of our journey into space.

Brownies (pictured above) and two others decided that we should go to the Christa Mcauliffe Space Education Center.  This magical place, in addition to being an elementary school, hides a wonderful adventure: the ability to go on simulated missions into space, Star Trek style.

I'd actually gone on missions at this location before, when I was a young nerd participating in the after-school club called Rocket Team.  But even ~10 years couldn't dim my excitement to go back and participate in another mission.

In a second stroke of brilliance, Brownies and co. decided that since we'd be going the weekend before Halloween, and because it would be epic, we should all go in costume.

And so Brownies and co. literally stayed up all night sewing so that we could look like this for our mission:

The staff thought we were awesome.  We agreed.

We did the mission called "The Children of Perikoi," in which the gods of a planet called Perikoi come every 12 years to choose the best and brightest adolescents and take them to live with the gods.  It was our job to figure out who or what the gods of Perikoi were, to figure out what the "choosing" was, to get involved if we didn't like the situation, to get to the planet, and to survive the ordeal.

Mission Accomplished.

I won't spoil all the details just in case you ever go yourself, but suffice it to say that there was a lot of action and I'm surprised we survived, especially without the real Picard, Geordi, and Data working their uncanny magic.

Blue (middle) was our captain, and he's accompanied by the ambassador (left) and the first officer (right).

I was the bridge engineer.  This is an active shot of me switching out an isolinear chip.

And here's the two of us after the mission.

We went out to lunch as a group afterwards and got some fun looks from the locals.  The following Monday (Halloween) Blue and I wandered around campus during lunch hour and got some great responses, including "Best I've seen all day!" and "This makes me so happy" in addition to several people flashing us the Vulcan salute.

What else can you do but return it with a "Live long, and prosper"?