HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — "Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five!" the kids yelled.

It wasn't as deafening as Times Square on New Year's Eve, but the 300 or so children attending Space Camp were as enthusiastic as any midnight revelers.

The space shuttle Atlantis was poised to blast off and, by luck, its Friday launch coincided with our trip to Alabama to learn about astronauts.

The campers — some as young as 7, many in their teens — continued the countdown, a crescendo of "four, three, two, one!"

They applauded as Atlantis cleared the tower and thundered into the Florida sky, watching raptly as the orbiter's crew jettisoned its solid-fuel rocket boosters, or SRBs, and activated its main engine cutoff.

During our 2 1/2 days at Space Camp, my son, Charles, and I would learn (and repeatedly fail to remember) all manner of NASA acronyms, clamber into low-gravity rides and simulators, study rocketry history and wobble around in a pretend space walk.

Watching the Atlantis launch with our fellow campers crystallized the risks, rewards and technical challenges of the very thing we were studying.

Space Camp, celebrating its 25th year, is an outgrowth of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center's museum education program and one of the center's many camp programs aimed at science-minded children, some of whom bring parents, some of whom don't.

We had signed up for a parent-child program, a course from Friday afternoon to Sunday morning that's geared for kids 7 to 12. Many campers were alone, either attending parentless Space Camp (ages 9 to 11), Space Academy (12 to 14) or Advanced Space Academy (15 to 18). The center offers identical programs oriented around aviation and fighter pilot training.

Space Camp is conducted in and around the rocket center's campus, which includes a bustling museum with the Apollo 16 capsule and a Mars-themed climbing wall, a variety of space-related theme-park rides, an Imax theater showing space movies, a rocket park filled with various NASA artifacts, including a Saturn V rocket, and a full-scale Space Shuttle prototype — sitting atop a massive external tank — or BOT, for "big orange thing" — and two SRBs.

Because we arrived early and our rooms weren't ready, Charles and I toured the museum, with a prominent exhibit called "Team Redstone: Supporting the Army Transformation," and a surprising number of weapons and military equipment on display.

We grabbed a quick lunch at Galaxy Food Court, which serves museum-quality salads, chicken strips and burgers. Charles kept noticing that some campers were wearing blue flight suits. Although I purposefully had not ordered one with our camp registration, it clearly was important to Charles, so I bought him one for $80. The uniform shop clerk stamped out a fancy name tag for Charles and told him he had to wear it upside down until he graduated.

FUN WHILE LEARNING

We then headed to Habitat, a hybrid of a futuristic astronaut dormitory-space station, where we picked up sheets, blankets and pillows, lugged our suitcases up to our second-floor quarters and made our beds. We were told to report to the lobby to meet the other members of our group and our adviser, Bob Jones.

The parent-child campers were divided into four teams of eight kids. Our band was called Apollo; others were dubbed Gemini, Mercury and Shuttle.

Apollo was an interesting, friendly bunch: There was one girl among seven boys, and the array of dads was diverse — one a poet, another a hedge-fund manager, another an elementary school teacher. We hit it off instantly.

Because so many campers, including (but hardly limited to) the parent-child crowd, were competing for time in a limited number of apparatuses, the next 2 1/2 days were broken into half-hour increments. It looked like a lot to accomplish.

"It is possible to learn and have fun at the same time," we were told by Matthew Green, a camp official, during orientation.

Charles and I were determined to prove him right.

Our weekend began with an overview of how the shuttle is assembled and how it flies and concluded with a trivia quiz focused on space history, those dreaded acronyms and other subjects: Charles was asked the French word for a rocket docking ("rendezvous").

The history lessons may have glossed over Werner von Braun's little Nazi problem and failed to mention that the Russian dog Laika, the first animal in space, died mere hours after launch, but we also learned plenty of fun space stuff. Charles' favorite: Half of all astronauts get space sick, and sometimes their, um, output eludes the air sickness bags and floats around in zero gravity.

Many of the educational opportunities paled compared to riding the Space Camp toys — which is why we came to Huntsville.

LUNAR GRAVITY

The first day, we strapped ourselves into the 1/6th Chair, which is supposed to simulate the moon's gravity. One at a time, parent and child were secured into a rig connected to a series of springs; with a good push, you could fly higher than Kobe Bryant.

After dinner of typical camp food and watching the Atlantis launch, we dashed to the Endeavour, a partial mock-up of a shuttle orbiter.

The Endeavour training and mission stand at the curriculum's center. During the weekend, we had two training missions and two "flights" inside the realistic orbiter, filled with computer screens, buttons and switches. Parents and children were assigned jobs alongside one another.

In our first mission, Charles and I were "mission specialists," meaning we got to go on a space walk. But before we could have our extravehicular activity, or EVA, we had to get the Endeavour into space.

One parent-child team was commander and pilot of the orbiter, another pair served as flight director and capsule communications officer in mission control, and so on. Almost everybody wore a microphone headset and followed a countdown and launch script with their lines highlighted.

It was like the spacecraft I had created with cardboard boxes, blankets and duct tape when I was a kid — but far cooler.

"I am switching on all three fuel cells and main power supplies," Charles said, flipping switches. "We are go for SSME gimbal check," said one dad over his microphone, referring to the space shuttle main engines. "Ignition systems armed!"

After we theoretically launched, Charles and I donned our spacewalk suits (complete with air-cooled helmets) and were secured into a rig that approximated weightlessness.

Our task sounded simple: Thread some steel rods into some fasteners and build a little metal structure. But with the helmets, the gloves and the weightless rig, it was hot, painstaking work.

The practice run seemed to go well enough, but when show time came, we didn't get the structure assembled in time. (We had no idea the clock was running.) Our fellow space campers closed the payload doors and re-entered the atmosphere without us.

"Well, at least we'll get buried at Arlington," I told Charles.

"If they ever find us!" he replied.

Our second mission went better. Charles and I were assigned the roles of station commander and station scientist, which consisted mostly of making super balls and homemade slime.

When we weren't dying in space or mixing up chemicals, Charles and I and the rest of the Apollo team went to see a couple of Imax movies, built and flew model rockets, designed a mission patch and a Lego space station, studied more space history and had a chance to ride several other simulators.

I wisely opted out of MAT (multi-axis trainer), a series of connected giant rings that flip and spin the rider. When Charles staggered out of it, his face was gray, his stomach in another galaxy.

By graduation time Sunday morning, Charles was feeling much better, and when we turned his space suit's name tag around, he beamed like an astronaut returned to Earth.

He wore the suit the entire flight home.