Teachers in Space

Nyack, NY - September 22, 2008 

Teachers all across the country are applying for a new astronaut program.

Teachers in Space is seeking two Pathfinder Astronauts who will become the first astronaut teachers to fly in space and return to the classroom.”Unlike the Educator Astronaut program, which takes teachers out of schools to join the NASA astronaut corps, we want to put astronaut teachers into American classrooms,” said Teachers in Space project manager Edward Wright.

“TIS will allow teachers to keep their day jobs,” Wright said. Pathfinder Astronauts will train on weekends and during the summer, so they will be able to keep their their full-time teaching jobs. “There will be about three weeks of training in total,” Wright said, “which will include both spaceflight training and professional development activities to improve their abilities as teachers.”

After they fly in space, Pathfinder Astronauts will be invited to return each summer to help teach the training course for new astronaut teachers. Eventually, Teachers in Space would like to fly 200 teachers a year, four from each and every state in the Union.

Teachers in Space began as a NASA project to fly a single teacher aboard the Space Shuttle. The original TIS project ended when the Challenger accident claimed the life of teacher Christa McAuliffe. NASA replaced Teachers in Space with the Educator Astronaut program, in which former teachers become full-time NASA employees. The original vision of putting an astronaut back into an American classroom was lost. That vision is now being revived by the new Teachers in Space program, a non-profit project of the Space Frontier Foundation and the United States Rocket Academy.

Rather than relying on the Space Shuttle, the new Teachers in Space program will use the new reusable suborbital spacecraft now being developed by American industry. These new spacecraft, which promise dramatic improvements in cost and safety, will enable large numbers of teachers to fly in space. “We want to put a thousand astronaut teachers into American schools, within the next decade,” Wright said.

The Pathfinder Astronauts will be the leaders who blaze the path for the large number of teachers who follow. 

More information about Teachers in Space is available on the project’s website. 

Teachers can submit applications for the Pathfinder program any time between now and December 4, 2008. Finalists will be announced and training will begin in 2009, which Pathfinder spaceflights expected to take place some time in 2010 or 2011.

admin Project notes

If you’re in Washington DC, you’ll have a special chance to hear about Teachers in Space on the evening of  Wednesday, July 16.

The Space Policy Institute at George Washington University will be hosting a Teachers in Space roundtable. The event, which is co-hosted by the Space Frontier Foundation and the NewSpace Alliance, will begin at 6:30 PM.

Speakers at the roundtable will discuss the current status of the Teachers in Space program, plans for the future, how Teachers in Space can help improve American education, and government policy alternatives for Teachers in Space. Following the 90-minute roundtable, guests and speakers will have a chance to mingle at a catered gourmet reception.

Admission is free. The roundtable and reception will take place in Room 213 at 1957 E Street NW.

Click here for a Google map to the event.

Watch this space for a list of speakers and further information.

admin Project notes

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. 

admin Spaceflight news

Teachers in Space is inviting all interested teachers to attend the first Astronaut Teacher workshop, to be held in Washington, DC this July 17-19 as part of the Space Frontier Foundation’s NewSpace 2008 conference.  

The goal of the workshop is to begin the design of a three-week spaceflight training course for teachers who are selected to fly in space. 

Space vehicle developers indicate that spaceflight participants will need about less than one week of training before a suborbital flight. Teachers in Space has surveyed hundreds of teachers and discovered that most teachers prefer a longer training period. The survey showed most teachers prefer to spend 2-4 weeks training before flight.

Based on this survey, Teachers in Space is baselining a three-week training course for astronaut teachers. The course will include about half a week of company-mandated training and about two-and-a-half weeks of enriched educational activities created by Teachers in Space. These activities will maximize the value of the experience to teachers and increase the scope of knowledge and experience they take back to the classroom.

At the first Astronaut Teacher Workshop, participating teachers will provide input and ideas that help Teachers in Space create an initial outline for this enriched training. Teachers in Space will later validate the outline by presenting it to larger groups of teachers at future Astronaut Teacher Workshops. Future workshops will be held at various locations throughout the US.  

The first workshop will also consider ways the Astronaut Teacher training might be adapted for use in other spaceflight-related settings. For example, an abridged version of the Astronaut Teacher course might be presented to teachers who are participating in spaceflight precursor activities such as weightless ballistic flights. A version of the course might even be offered directly to students. 

To encourage teachers to attend this workshop, the Space Frontier Foundation is offering a special conference rate to participants. Teachers may register for a single-day conference pass and receive admission to the full three-day conference.

For additional details, teachers may contact Teachers in Space project manager Edward Wright at edward.v.wright@gmail.com or Don McMahon at dmcmaz@msn.com. 

admin Project notes

“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.

admin Spaceflight news

Two sources are offering teachers free seeds that have flown in space for classroom use. The NASA Engineering Design Challenge is offering cinnamon basil seeds to the first 100,000 takers. NASA wants students from elementary to high-school level to design, build, and test lunar plant growth chambers using the seeds, which flew aboard the International Space Station and Space Shuttle flight STS-118. Sign up at this link. Epsori Space Systems is offering a mix of seeds that have flown in space, including alfalfa, radish, and the dreaded broccolli. Teachers can sign up at this link. Below, basil seeds are exposed to space on the Materials on ISS-3 experiment.

admin Resources

XCOR Aerospace, one of the companies signed up to help take teachers to space, has just made Inc. magazine’s Inc. 500 list of fast-growing private companies. The magazine says:

Why it’s growing: Speed to market. The company strives to design, build, and test rockets on a much shorter schedule than the rest of the industry, where the norm is to conduct only a few rocket tests a year and then analyze the results at length. Among its process innovations, XCOR uses a mobile test launch pad and eschews toxic propellants, which require delicate handling.

An XCOR press release says:

XCOR’s journey from a start-up in 1999 to the Inc. 500 was not easy. Aerospace veterans Jeff Greason, Dan DeLong, Aleta Jackson, and Doug Jones formed XCOR, where they built and tested their first rocket engines on a tiny budget. The breakthrough came when the team decided to modify a pusher-propeller-powered Long EZ airplane and replace its conventional piston engine with XCOR-designed and built rocket engines. This demonstrated XCOR’s re-usable and re-startable rocket motors on actual flying hardware. The rocket plane not only proved the reliability of XCOR’s technology, it generated publicity and helped raise the firm’s profile in the aerospace industry. This attracted serious investors, including Esther Dyson and the investment group Boston Harbor Angels.

The higher profile and proven technology helped XCOR compete for and win a series of contracts with NASA and the Department of Defense. These contracts include building and testing a methane engine for NASA, and designing a suborbital space plane for the Air Force….

XCOR is currently working on a craft designed to carry people and payloads into suborbital space, but its longer term goal is to build a craft that can place them into orbit.

For the complete press release, look here.

admin Project notes