Teachers, be a part-time astronaut!

In 1984, President Regan announced the Teacher in Space Project to put a teacher in space to inpsire students to pursue interests in math and science.  Out of over 11,000 applicants, NASA selected two candidates for opportunity: Christa McAuliffe and Barbara Morgan.  Christa McAuliffe was supposed to be the first teacher in space on the 1986 STS-51-L Challenger mission, but unfortunately disaster struck.  Morgan was later selected as a NASA astronaut mission specialist and flew in space on STS-118 in 2007.  Her primary duty on that mission was operating the robotic arm to help add the S5 truss to the ISS, but she did spend about six hours teaching students from space.



In 2003, NASA announced the Educator Astronaut Project, which was similar to the previous Teachers in Space Project except that astronauts would undergo full training as mission specialists in addition to their teaching responsibilities.  Joseph Acaba, Richard Arnold and Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger were selected as the first Mission Specialist Educators in the 2004.

Now, a new teacher astronaut program has been announced.  The Teachers in Space Program will allow teachers to train on weekends and summers so they can keep their day jobs as teachers.  The idea is to have a pool of teacher astronauts trained by the time the first commercial space vehicles start operating in a few years.  The program is jointly sponsored by the Space Frontier Foundation and United States Rocket Academy.  Applications for the first two "Pathfinder' astronauts are due December 4, 2008.

Comments

Oberon said…
.....youtube....john lenard walson....look through his telescope.
23 September, 2008 13:55
BrianShiro said…
Oberon, what does your suggestion have to do with the Teachers in Space program?
23 September, 2008 14:17
Anonymous said…
Barbara Morgan taught several lessons from space. She did downlinks to students on Earth, and conducted a shortwave student session, in addition to performing all of her Mission Specialist duties. Go to YouTube and type in "Barbara Morgan." You'll see.
24 September, 2008 04:50
BrianShiro said…
Anonymous commenter, thanks for the correction. I've updated the last sentence of the first paragraph accordingly.
24 September, 2008 07:38
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Insider tips on NASA's astronaut selection

Image
While NASA wraps up interviewing the second group of finalists to determine its 2013 class of ASCANs, the head of the NASA Astronaut Selection Office Duane Ross gave an illuminating presentation at JSC last Thursday about the selection process.  He covered questions ranging from academic degrees to interview questions, medical screening, and Russian language requirements. Pete Dimmick was among those present in the audience. Here are his notes from the event, reprinted with permission: Today I attended a lecture by Duane Ross and his protege, Anne Roemer. Duane has been the head of the astronaut selection process for 37 years and I had a few minutes to speak with them after the lecture was over. Here is what I found out about becoming an astronaut. I won't discuss so much the published requirements, rather I'll be focusing more on the insider things. There have been 257 NASA astronauts over the years and an applicant has a 0.6% chance of being selected. Of those no...
READ MORE >>

The Astronaut Hopeful's Manifesto

Image
I am an astronaut hopeful – one of thousands of people who somehow never outgrew our childhood dream of going to space. Anyone can hope to be an astronaut, but to be an “astronaut hopeful” one must make a commitment to the goal and proactively work towards becoming an astronaut. The road is long and the outcome is uncertain, but it is in trying to achieve this lofty ambition that we learn to become our best selves. Astronauts train to be some of the most focused, resourceful, healthy and dependable people on the planet. Striving to be more like them can help any person to be more effective in life’s pursuits. Making the decision to do everything one can to actually become an astronaut means learning from astronaut role models and making incremental decisions throughout your life that get you closer to your dream. This week NASA began accepting applications to recruit another class of astronaut candidates (ASCAN’s). More than 6,300 people applied during the last opportunity, from ...
READ MORE >>

New CSA, ESA, and JAXA Astronauts

Mark your calendars for May 13 and 20. That's when Canada's CSA and Europe's ESA will announce their new astronaut selections. In a press release earlier today, CSA said it would announce its two new astronauts on May 13. Back in March, I reported that CSA released a great deal of information on the top 16 astronaut candidates in its recruitment campaign. This included biographies of the top 16 candidates and video and photos of their evaluation and testing. CSA has been very good with keeping the public informed through the astronaut selection process with regular posts to its website . I liked how CSA was able to interview a relatively large pool of applicants remotely via teleconference, which is something NASA did not do. As I reported in a previous post , CSA had 5352 applicants for only 2 slots. This makes CSA's selectivity 2/5352 = 0.037%! May 13 Update: CSA has announced its two newest astronauts David Saint-Jacques and Jeremy Hansen . Congrat...
READ MORE >>