From The Compass, Vol. 3, No. 1, September, 1998.
The Boeing Company selected 25 educators from around our country and five from other countries to send to Space Camp last summer. Somehow I was chosen to be among the 30 to go. Also attending from our area was Derby Middle School science teacher Glenn Dunn. The entire nine days was for me a fantastic experience that I will work to share with as many people as possible.
The first leg of our journey was to Houston, Texas where we spent our time at Space Center Houston and NASA's Johnson Space Center. There we learned about future manned missions to Mars, space suits, the International Space Station and much more. During this time we also toured the old and new mission control, met an astronaut, and walked through full sized mockups for the Space Station. It was 2 ½ days packed full of NASA's past, present, and future in space.
From there we went to Huntsville, Alabama for Space Camp. Space Camp
is located at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center which includes an
impressive outdoor Rocket Park, with a full sized Space Shuttle and an
indoor museum of space artifacts. We also toured the facilities where
Boeing is assembling modules for the International Space Station which
will launch its first module into orbit later this year.
An exciting part of the space camp experience was the astronaut training and flying on a simulated shuttle flight. It was all quite impressive. We got to experience some of the aspects of working in a weightless and frictionless environment where Newton's Laws of Motion become very important. One other thing that I learned is that many people are doing simulated space missions with kids in their own schools.
One way that I am trying to share my Space Camp experience with others
is on-line. You can find my Space Camp Web pages at:
My goal with these pages is not just to show off what we did, but rather to provide a site where lots of space information for teachers and students can be found. You will find information and links there that will take you into our space program's past, present, and future.
The second way to bring some of my space camp experience to young people is through a classroom presentation that I am developing called Your Future in Space. The goal here is to tie NASA's plans for space over the next 20 years or so directly to the lives of your students. By laying out what kinds of exploration there will be, what kind of jobs will be needed to do the exploring and how they can prepare to be a part of it. Hopefully, the presentation will be classroom ready by mid-October.
Call (316) 978-3191 for more details or to reserve this presentation for your students.