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Astronaut tells students: NASA needs you

Posted on: Wednesday, 7 April 2004, 06:00 CDT

Astronaut Steve Bowen wants to go to Mars. And he wants students to work hard in school so they can get there, too.

Bowen, a Navy commander who joined NASA in 2000, spoke Tuesday to Pender's 375 kindergartners through 12th-graders as part of the NASA Explorer Schools program.

Pender is one of 50 schools from across the country that are receiving instructional materials, teacher training and money to increase students' interest in science, math and technology.

Before Bowen's talk, NASA Assistant Administrator Lee Forsgren showed the students video excerpts of a January speech by President Bush in which the president outlined his vision for the space program. It includes the completion of the International Space Station by 2010, a return to the moon by 2020 and eventually manned missions to Mars and beyond.

"The people who go to Mars, it isn't going to be Commander Bowen or myself or our generation," Forsgren said. "We might be around (long) enough to get us back to the moon. You guys are going to be the ones who take us to Mars and beyond."

Bowen, 40, encouraged the kids to study math and science, but he wasn't ready to give up on his own dream.

"You may go on to be engineers and scientists and doctors and take my job away from me - but I'm not that old, and I am going to go to Mars, despite what Lee said - but you can do anything in your life. ... You have got to put the time in ahead of time."

The students wanted to know the total number of astronauts (about 100), how hard it is to become one (out of every 1,000 who apply, seven are chosen) and what Bowen wanted to be when he was a kid (an architect and a pro hockey player).

Forsgren said later that it's important to NASA and the country that American students focus on math, science and engineering.

At the space agency, he said, "We have three times as many engineers who are over 60 than we do under 30. ... We've got to replace those people relatively soon."

Pender science teachers Jane Swartz and Coralynn Malmberg said they have incorporated as many of the NASA materials into their classrooms as they can.

As part of the program, the two will head to Johnson Space Center in Houston this month to ride in a modified KC-135, known as the "Vomit Comet," which flies in such a way as to create 20 to 25 seconds of weightlessness. Typical missions last two to three hours and consist of 30 to 40 such weightless periods.

Both expressed nervousness about the flights, but Malmberg said, "One of the big benefits is to show the kids that even their old women teachers can go out and do this. Anything's possible."

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