News of reviving ancient 80s IP generally isn’t triggering.

For me, the news of a Space Camp TV series brings back memories of going to see the film in the summer of 1986, thinking this would be some kind of tonic to the then fresh scars of the Challenger disaster.

The movie wasn’t a catharsis, though it did expose my 11 year-old self to the new and uncomfortable awareness that I needed one. I don’t remember anything about the film, other than I’m pretty certain it’s the first movie I ever walked out of thinking, I would have done that differently. I am always trying to do things differently in my stories, which are often fantastic extrapolations of very real things.

I write a lot about grief.

Last year I wrote a short story about the Challenger incident, the first attempt on my part to deal with it directly outside a kind of essay back in college. I didn’t feel I’d arrived at anything writing the story, and indeed, the protagonist doesn’t exactly make peace with his grief so much as revise it. That’s what a lot of my writing feels like.

Not release; revision.

I think in some way, maybe, it stems from that early inability to process the shock and despair of Challenger. This wasn’t exclusive to me. As is often the case with major American disasters, there’s an instinct to suppress even the smallest reminders. There was some conversation around whether Space Camp would release or not; though it came out, not everything associated with the space program did.

I wasn’t processing the constant loop of images in my head of the atomic death of the space shuttle. I was re-running film, trying to rewrite something that can’t be unwritten. I do this for pretty much every traumatic event in my life, and writing is a kind of mental hamster wheel. I’m chasing something I’ll never catch, but I keep doing it, because it’s my instinct.

My instinct is to avoid this Space Camp revival. The creators will be rebooting and reconceptualizing the film for a new generation, but I feel like I’ve been doing that in my head for over thirty years.