Space activists took one small step toward bringing more teachers to the final frontier today, by opening up the application process for a privately backed "Teachers in Space" project. Organizers plan to award seats on a suborbital spacecraft to one science/tech teacher and another teacher in any subject area.
Speaking amid the buildup to this weekend's X Prize Cup air and rocket expo, project manager Edward Wright noted that schoolteachers were among the first on the frontier during America's infancy. "We believe that teachers have the right stuff for opening the space frontier and playing the same role today," he told reporters at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.
Details of the program, organized jointly by the Space Frontier Foundation and Wright's United States Rocket Academy, are still being nailed down. For example, no deadline has been specified for getting the application in - or for selecting the first two "pathfinder" teacher-astronauts.
"We aren't sure what to expect. ... We would like to announce a winner probably next year, but it depends on how the teachers respond," Wright told me.
It also depends on which suborbital space companies are ready to fly passengers in what time frame. Five companies - Armadillo Aerospace, Masten Space Systems, Planetspace, Rocketplane Global and XCOR Aerospace - have donated at least one seat each to the program. Wright said XCOR has offered seats in the "double digits," although he declined to cite a specific number. The current conventional wisdom is that those companies will be open for spaceflight business no earlier than 2010.
Teachers in Space builds on the two-decade-old promise of NASA's program to put educators in orbit. The first such space mission ended tragically in 1986 when elementary-school teacher Christa McAuliffe died along with her six fellow fliers in the Challenger tragedy. McAuliffe's backup, Idaho schoolteacher Barbara Morgan, flew on a shuttle mission just this August. Two more educator-astronauts are due to go into space next year.
Wright, however, gave a failing grade to NASA's educator-astronaut program. He noted that during the August flight, agency administrator Mike Griffin insisted that Morgan was not an educator-astronaut, but an astronaut who used to be an educator. The same would likely go for other teachers who joined NASA's astronaut corps, Wright said.
"Unfortunately, these educator-astronauts will never return to the classrooms from which they came," he said.
That outcome runs counter to the spirit of a true educator-astronaut program - and sends the wrong message to the next generation of spacefliers, Wright said. To back up his argument, he displayed a viewgraph showing the annual recruitment levels for astronauts and severall categories of professional athletes. The bar for astronauts was woefully short in comparison.
Wright's statement on the Teachers in Space Web site laid out the lesson behind the viewgraph:
"Since the beginning of the Space Age, 50 years ago, students have been told that if they studied math and science, they could grow up to become astronauts and go into space.
"Unfortunately, that was a false promise. Even at the height of the shuttle program, a student had a better chance of becoming an NBA basketball player than a NASA astronaut. No wonder today's students show more interest in athletics than math and science.
"What if we could turn that around and show students that they have a real chance for a future in space?
"Imagine thousands of astronaut teachers, in schools all across the country, sharing their spaceflight knowledge and experiences with millions of students. This vision could become a reality within the next 10 years."
Ideally, the first two pathfinder astronauts would encourage the federal government or private donors to support a steady stream of space teachers, Wright said. In addition, the application process itself would produce a lasting legacy.
Wright said applicants would be required to submit proposed microgravity experments (for teachers in science, technology, engineering and math) or space-related curriculum plans (for the broader educational categories). Those documents would be made freely available through a Wiki database that will soon be set up, Wright said.
The Teachers in Space program got a gold star from Armadillo Aerospace team member Neil Milburn, whose full-time job is teaching high-school physics. Once upon a time, Milburn recalled, half the kids in a classroom would put up their hands when the teacher asked them how many wanted to go into space. Nowadays, he counts himself lucky if 2 or 3 percent raised their hands. Programs like Teachers in Space - and increased interest in commercial spaceflight - could make a difference, he said.
"I think I can see it start to change the corner again," Milburn said.
