Teachers in Space

Education and commercial spaceflight figured prominently in a speech given by NASA Administrator (and former Shuttle astronaut) General Charles Bolden to the National Association of Investment Companies on October 20.

It appears Bolden is a big fan of private human spaceflight.

This is a refreshing change. Just five years ago, the President’s Commission on Moon, Mars, and Beyond (the “Aldridge Commission”) declared that human spaceflight would “remain the province of government” for the foreseeable future.

Incredibly, the Aldridge Commission issued that report just days after Mike Melvill earned the first FAA commercial astronaut wings (and made the front page of every newspaper in the world) by piloting SpaceShip One — a classic of beltway insiders being out-of-touch with what’s going on in the rest of the country.

Bolden’s predecessor, Mike Griffin, once told a graduate student it was “not NASA’s job” to help America excel in STEM education.

It appears that General Bolden sees things differently. Here are some excerpts from his speech:

The law that created NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, as amended, gives NASA an often overlooked mission. NASA’s founding legislation states that we will “seek and encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space.”

Whatever the President’s decision [about NASA's future direction], America needs NASA and private industry to work to achieve our national goals in space. This means that NASA must determine efficient and effective ways to leverage the power, and innovation of American industry and the American entrepreneur.

NASA has many tools for this. We can buy more needed products and services in a commercial manner. In the 1920s, the U.S. Post Office became a major customer for airmail, which created the demand that justified the private investment in many airlines.

NASA is doing something similar right now. We are engaged in a new program — the Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research program — that will buy space transportation services from the emerging reusable spaceflight companies to conduct science research, technology development, with a keen focus on education….

As the NASA Administrator one of my greatest challenges — the job I was given by the President — is to lead our NASA team in inspiring the next generation of Americans to once again seek become interested in math, science, engineering, and technology so that our nation can maintain its technological leadership in the world.

For over two decades, I have been speaking to children at schools around America. When I first started, in 1980when I would ask kids if they wanted to be astronauts, nearly every hand would go up. Kids were inspired by astronauts. But in recent years that has changed. Today, in comparison, I have noticed that fewer hands go up.

This problem is not in our youngest. I still get a highly positive reaction from kindergarteners, first and second graders. But somewhere after that time we lose them. Studies show that by the time they have reached high-school, kids have made up their minds about whether they are going to pursue a career in math, science or engineering. Study after study shows we are losing them in the middle grade school years – sometimes as early as third grade for young black boys.

Why is this?

Many kids today are more excited, more motivated, to become a basketball or football star, than they are motivated to be an astronaut, even though the odds are similar. Others are deciding they want to be the next Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos rather than pursue a career in science or engineering. They are deciding they want to get rich by making the next new thing.

I am here today to suggest that we can change this dynamic — not by fighting against it, but by working with it.

I am convinced that within almost everybody —our high-school students, our 7th graders, and yes the 30, 40, and 50 somethings - in this audience — lives that kindergartener who still wants to go to space.

What if you did not have to choose between getting rich, doing good, and going to space? What if you could do all three at the same time? Who here in this room would make that choice?

What if you were a seventh grader and you knew that if you buckled down, and studied hard at math and science, that you could go to space? Not because you would be the one of the very few who might become a NASA astronaut, as I was so privileged, but because you saw hundreds of people of all nations traveling into space each and every year, and knew in your bones that you could soon be one of them?

What if you were a college student, and you knew that you could build real hardware in a semester engineering class, and that before the end of the semester your experiment would fly in space, and that you would get the results back from space before you got your grades?

This day could come soon.

The complete text of General Bolden’s speech is available at this link: http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/395165main_Bolden_NAIC_Speech.pdf

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Educator astronaut Barbara Morgan will soon be leaving NASA. Boise State University in Idaho has announced that Morgan will become a Distinguished Educator in Residence at the university: 

Through a dual appointment to Boise State’s colleges of engineering and education, will advise, lead and represent the university in its policy development, advocacy and fundraising in STEM-related programs, scholarships and initiatives. She will serve as a Boise State ambassador for scientific literacy in the community and help guide education policy in Idaho. Also, she will direct Boise State’s efforts to bring NASA education programs to area school districts, and serve as a guest lecturer and student mentor in departments across campus.

It’s encouraging to see Barbara Morgan returning to academia. Unfortunately, her retirement underscores one of the problems with the way the Educator Astronaut program is currently constructed. The program seeks out the best teachers and takes them out of the classroom, and they have no chance to return as long as they are part of the program. 

Last August, Teachers in Space called on NASA to announce flight dates for the remaining three educator astronauts. NASA partially responded to this call in October, when it announced that two educator astronauts would fly on Space Shuttle mission STS-119. Unfortunately, NASA has not responded to the call to help educator astronauts return to the classroom after flight. If they want to do that, they’re on their own, like Barbara Morgan. 

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“Unmanned” space supporters would have us believe that humans are obsolete and space should be the exclusive domain of robots, but an incident that occured last spring shows why humans (especially pilots) are not yet obsolete.

In February, a flight of six F-22 Raptors (the USAF’s newest, most high-tech fighter) was being deloyed to Japan for the first time. When the Raptors crossed the International dateline, all software in the  six planes abruptly failed. The aircraft were without communications, navigation, even fuel management, reports Daily Tech.

If the Raptor had been an “unmanned” aircraft, all six planes would have crashed. They would have been lost in mid-ocean; the wreckage (including flight recorders) might never have been recovered. Engineers would have spent months, perhaps years, trying to determine what went wrong.

Instead, pilots were able to improvise emergency procedures for a situation no one had anticipated. Human skills and courage allowed them to follow their tankers back to Hawaii and an emergency landing. Having pilots onboard saved a billion dollars worth of aircraft from a watery grave.

Software errors like the International dateline bug are common in new systems. A similar bug led to the loss of NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter. In that case, programmers accidentally used English rather than metric units. Unlike the Raptor,  however, Mars Climate Orbiter had no pilot who could compensate for the error. Instead of going into orbit around Mars, it crashed on the surface.

The ability of humans to improvise and correct for unexpected situations is useful not only in operational missions but also during flight test. That’s one reason why piloted aircraft are generally cheaper to develop than Unmanned Air Vehicles. (In fact, many of the larger UAVs are flown as piloted aircraft first and transition to unmanned operation later in the development program.)

Such lessons should be kept in mind when designing future space programs.

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