Students have a blast at NASA camps

From The Republic: Students have a blast at NASA camps
San Angelo, Texas — Lori Scott's dream of becoming an astronaut was dashed this summer.

While attending a NASA camp for high school students at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, the Central High School senior found out she's too short to travel into space. The minimum height is 62 inches, or 5-foot-2.

But Scott found out there are a wealth of other opportunities in the U.S. space program, especially in its mission to put humans on Mars.

"I still want to work at NASA, in the control room," Scott said.

She and five classmates spent much of their junior year at Central working on getting into the competitive NASA High School Aerospace Scholars summer camp.

Central High physics teacher Carly Stephens found out about the program while attending the Space Exploration Educators Conference at Johnson Space Center in 2009 and came back excited about the opportunities the program could hold for her students. Four ended up attending the six-day camps in 2010.

Stephens said admittance into the program involves a lot of hard work and is highly competitive.

Applications must be submitted in November and require a recommendation from their teacher and their congressman. Those accepted start working in January on 10 assignments, which are due every other week and are graded by a team of educators working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

"Because the program requires a lot of outside work, I let them know that in advance," Stephens said. "I try to show all the positives about it so they can get excited about it."

Stephens said only the top students in the state are selected, and NASA pays for "absolutely everything."

"They have different sessions throughout the summer," she said. "They've really had to network with students across the state."

Central senior Katherine Lauer, who attended the camp this summer, said 600 applications were accepted and, of those, 400 made the grade for the camps. NASA chooses the week a student will attend.

"We all had a little bit different experience," Lauer said.

Lauer said she wanted the opportunity to work with people who work at NASA, "to see people who are only a couple of years older than us who actually have internships there."

Nearly all the students who have attended say they plan to go into some field of engineering.

Central High seniors Gareth Fulks, Kevin Minzenmayer, Zach Pfluger and Jacob Starnes also attended the camps this summer.

Pfluger he was inspired to get into the program by curiosity.

"For one, I wanted to know what NASA was all about professionally, what was offered there, first-person view of what it's like to work there," he said.

Fulks said he plans to pursue a degree in chemical engineering.

"I liked getting to see what's really going on at NASA robots, test facilities, the astronauts' neutral buoyancy lab," Fulks said.

The buoyancy lab is the largest indoor pool in the world and contains a replica of the outer frame of the International Space Station.

"The water mimics space, floating in space," Scott said.

Pfluger said he wants to pursue a career in petroleum engineering or aerospace engineering.

"Aerospace engineering because of being at the camp, exploring the unknown out there," he said. "Petroleum engineering, it's something that's going to be around my whole lifetime. It's dependable; how I grew up."

Scott, who found out she is too short to be an astronaut, got a firsthand look at Mission Control.

"I was very lucky the week I went," she said, "the shuttle was docked at the space station and we watched a spacewalk from Mission Control."

Stephens said she will ask the six students who attended the camp to talk to this year's juniors about their experiences.

"For a lot of these students, this is just a steppingstone," she said. "There are so many NASA programs that will be available to them. They can apply for paid internships and those are not just shadowing; those are internships involved in the process."

She said the students' parents have said they see a new enthusiasm in the 17-year-olds.

"This generation, I think they have to have that excitement sparked," Stephens said. "They were born into a generation where people go into space — no big deal. I want them to have excitement for the next opportunity that will be available for them in space. I want them to dream."