text: Spacecamp is my favorite movie. It is a great story and also inspires others.<br /><br />The acting was excellent and my wife and I went to see Lea Thompson in Cabaret years later due to her performance in the movie. It is unfortunate that the Challenger Accident delayed and hurt the movie.<br /><br />The 20th Anniversary of the Challenger Accident is coming up. I knew one of the Challenger Astronauts off and on since childhood on the Carnegie Mellon campus where my father went to school; I also know a close friend of the late pilot.<br /><br />I was the technical review last year for National BSA for the Boy Scout Astronomy Merit Badge and I still find Spacecamp a great movie to recommend to Scouts doing the Space related merit badges I teach.<br /><br />I ran into the late astronaut again as an adult and was following a schedule of engineering education we had put together when Challenger blew up. I wound up sitting in with Willard Rockwell and his engineers,"invisible", going over things after the Accident at the Astrotech stockholders meeting by chance as a result, so I'm much closer to the Accident and any movie similarities. I made sure that I was a good student and finished the degree four years later, strangely enough, on the recommendation of the Rockwell engineer who told them not to fly Challenger in 1986 and who later built Endeavour.