“We’re going to see what it’s like to ride a rocket into space; to live, work, eat, sleep and play in space, as well as how we come back safely,” Ewenson said. “What I want you guys to understand is I’m just a regular person like you guys. If you have a dream and you’re willing to work hard at it, you can achieve anything you want to achieve.”
His own dream of working in the space program began at the age of four on a family trip from his native Canada to the Kennedy Space Center. For 20 years, he was an astronaut trainer with the Canadian Space Agency and NASA, training astronauts to do his work in space.
The follow-up sessions — including opportunities to learn about the challenges of civil engineering and working with building materials in space by building structures from balloons, and practicing programing a robot to move in a figure 8 — offered hands-on activities for the students.
“We’re not trying to make astronauts out of the kids. We’re exposing them to opportunities in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM),” Ewenson said after his talk. “Really what we try to do is not only to expose them to those opportunities but we want them to know that no matter where they come from — whether its a small town or a big city — they can aspire to those dreams. But their end of the bargain is they have to work hard in school.”
He noted that he tells people that “not everyone’s going to be an astronaut,” pointing out there are 43,000 workers at NASA and 42 active astronauts in the space program.
“I’m one of the 40,000 people that if I don’t do my job, those people don’t make it to space,” Ewenson said, adding there are many jobs and ways to contribute to the nation’s space program without being an astronaut.
The first Friday of May is Space Day World Wide.
Sharon Eggleston is the North East Regional coordinator for Space Day, helping interested schools set up Space Day activities. She started doing so 17 years ago through a Lockheed Martin program; her first Space Day was in one classroom at Coffin Elementary School in Brunswick.
“And now, each year, we do approximately 3,500 students with Space Day activities,” Eggleston said, adding that participation does vary annually; some years it’s been closer to 10,000 students in Maine taking part.
Having worked her way through Lockheed Martin, starting as a file clerk and retiring as a senior project engineer — Eggleston worked on every destroyer that came from Maine — she was able to see the lack of engineering education in the public sector.
“There were just not enough things that I could see out in the public that were dealing with engineering with young kids,” she said. “So that’s why I started to think I’d like to bring the whole concept of STEM into Space Day.”
The most important thing for Eggleston is to give students opportunities to meet people in these STEM fields, opportunities that can change their lives and excite them.
“Really, the bottom line is, we all want to make a difference,” she said. “I’m hoping that through the program I bring in and all the people I bring in, that we all inspire these students, and the key is hopefully many of them will start to consider STEM education, to go into STEM fields.”
That is why the program focuses on middle school students, before they choose what direction they’re going in after high school.
“We’re planting a seed and hopefully that seed will grow,” Eggleston said, allowing students to start to take some of these STEM classes “that can literally change the course of their life for the better.”
Shari Templeton, the Maine Department of Education’s science and technology specialist, said what Eggleston and her team does is phenomenal, providing kids across the state a taste of what NASA and the space program is all about with a contagious enthusiasm.
As for getting kids involved in STEM education, “We certainly have a long ways to go in terms of the preparation that we’re doing to fill the pipeline of necessary jobs in the STEM fields,” she said, so the more students they can engage the better.
Eggleston looks for points of contact with schools to get them resources for Space Day. She can be contacted through the Maine Space Grant Consortium (www.msgc.org). She points educators to www.spotthestation.com which provides alerts to when the International Space Station is passing over your location. All teachers in Maine can also go to the education resources center inside the Challenger Learning Center in Bangor and can get many resources and materials for free.
dmoore@timesrecord.com
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