Young astronauts,
teacher high on
Space Academy

Attending this year’s Space Academy was as inspiring for chaperone Corey Heitschmidt, a math teacher at Housel Middle School in Prosser, as it was for the three migrant students sponsored this year by the state’s Migrant Education Program.

Heitschmidt says he will be bringing some valuable NASA training experiences back to his classroom after attending the "Space Academy for Educators" this summer at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala.

Heitschmidt was selected as the recipient of the Washington State Migrant Education Program's teacher scholarship to attend the weeklong Space Academy for Educators.  Heitschmidt and the three migrant students he chaperoned attended the Space Academy training July 15-22.  

“We get to see the history of space exploration. It’s kind of a living history. You get to see stuff that people actually flew in to go into space and to the moon,” says Heitschmidt. “You see how NASA has progressed to where they are now and where they want to go. … A lot of what NASA focused on was what’s next, not just what’s done. That got the students excited.

“There are a lot of things that NASA wants to do, and they are going to need a lot of people to do it,” the teacher says. “They also focused on telling the kids that it’s not just science – there are people in NASA who are excellent in literature who are writing manuals, people excellent in math doing all kinds of engineering-type things. It’s not just one thing they have to be good at.”

While the three students were in their Space Academy sessions, the Prosser teacher spent the week engaged in a program specifically geared for educators, including astronaut-style trainings and simulations, intensive classroom and laboratory experiences, and specific training on how to make space science and exploration an exciting topic for his students and how it can integrate instruction in reading, math, geography, astronomy and other sciences.

Heitschmidt currently teaches 160 students, 37 of which are migrants. 

Migrant students who accompanied him to Huntsville were:

·  Lizette Melendez, a 7^th grade student at Wapato Middle School in the Wapato School District, served by the ESD 105 Migrant Education Regional Office (MERO).

·  Carlos Lopez, a 9^th grade student at Soap Lake Middle School in the Soap Lake School District, served by the ESD 171 MERO.

·  Arturo Martinez, a middle school student from Shelton School District, representing the ESD 189 MERO region.

For many years the state's Migrant Education Program has sent at least three migrant students to the Space Academy.  The scholarship pays for all expenses for the students' participation, including registration, meals, and lodging during their stay at the center, as well as a round-trip plane ticket.

Like their chaperone, the students can learn about the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), aviation, space, Mars (NASA’s next major project), interplanetary travel, flight dynamics, robotics, etc. They also get to experience jet fighter and astronaut simulators. 

The youths and teacher enjoyed the Space Museum, with the largest collection of rockets in the world. They saw the first rocket to put an American into space, along with the massive Saturn V rocket that took Americans to the moon.

The migrant students experienced a Mars Mission and saw other movies in the giant-screen IMAX SpaceDome Theater. They got to feel four G's of liftoff force and the sensation of weightlessness on the Space Shot simulator.

The Prosser teacher and the three students who went this year all say they would “love to go again in a heartbeat. The week went by way too fast.”

The experience teaches things that can never be adequately learned through a book, Heitschmidt adds.

“It’s one thing to see something in a book and talk about what’s in the book. But when you go down there and see the actual Apollo 16 capsule, and the counselors are saying, ‘You are now looking out the same windows the astronauts looked out of to see the moon,’ it adds something to it that you don’t forget,” he says.

The students’ enthusiasm verified Heitschmidt’s observations.

“Attending Space Academy in Alabama was one of the most educational and fun things I have ever done,” says Melendez. “Everything I did and learned I will always remember.” 

“It taught me a lot about responsibility, leadership, and, most importantly, teamwork,” she says.  “Space camp got me thinking about someday maybe working for NASA.

“I learned many things. For example, about rockets and how they work, the things astronauts do, and about the missions,” the Wapato middle school student says. “What I thought was interesting was when we were to do missions. I got to float on the 1/6 chair, simulating an astronaut’s spacewalk to fix something outside a shuttle or space station. We got to go on simulators; they were awesome!  I enjoyed listening to a veteran astronaut, Story Musgrave, who visited us.”

Melendez says she will also always remember the people she met at the academy, especially Arturo and Carlos, with whom she traveled from Washington. 

“They were really outgoing and easy to talk to,” says Melendez, who had never even flow in an airplane before this trip. “My other teammates were great, too.  They were so fun to be with.  It was like a Space Academy family!  The girls in my room were the best people I have ever met, even though we were all so different.  Our whole team decided we would keep in touch and try to come back next year!”

 “It was a lot of fun,” agrees Lopez. “I experienced the 1/6 chair. You feel like you are walking on the moon at 1/6 of your weight. You could jump a little bit and fall a lot. The chair has a lot a lot of springs, so when you move a little you bounce a lot.”

He also enjoyed the “ride” that simulates the kind of G-forces the astronauts experience as they launch into space.

It was toward the end of the week of training that the students participated in mock space missions.

“We served missions on the shuttle. We went out in space and connected with a space station, then came back to earth to land. I played payload specialist and later flight director,” Lopez says.

He also enjoyed meeting new people – both other students and such experts in space exploration as two astronauts who attended this year’s academy.

“One of them helped fix the Hubble Telescope,” Lopez says.

The Soap Lake student, whose parents work in the fields to support their family, says the academy “made me want to keep going to school and to work harder. I would like to work for NASA and help build rockets.”

Lopez, who was born in Mexico and has only lived in the U.S. two years, already speaks English fluently and with only a hint of accent.

It was also a “fun, a neat experience” for Arturo Martinez, who says he learned a lot and increased his interest in science.

The Shelton youth also enjoyed making new friends, meeting the astronauts and doing the simulation rides.

Martinez also enjoyed participating in a Jeopardy-like “Space Bowl” competition at the end of the week to see how much they had learned. He said it demonstrated that they had learned a lot, although his team did not win.

On his mock space missions Martinez served as a space station specialist and later as a hydraulics specialist.

“As station specialist I did experiments and got to do a space walk,” he says.

Martinez’s father works with a seafood company on the beach and from a platform boat gathering clams and other seafood. His mother works for a labor union.

All three youth highly recommend the program to other students.

“I can’t say in words how grateful I am for having the opportunity to attend the Space Academy,” says Melendez.  “If I had the opportunity to go again, I would do it in a heartbeat!”

Heitschmidt says he and the students all got excited even as they first approached the U.S. Space and Rocket Center.

“When you pull up at night, it’s all lit up with lights on all the rockets and shuttles. It really gets you excited, and so the kids got more excited the closer we got,” he says.

Then the kids went their way, and he had his own training throughout the week with 83 other teachers from throughout the world – from as far away as Korea, Guam, Puerto Rico, Japan.

“We went to classes where we went over lessons for science, math and language arts – all kinds of lessons, which was really fascinating. It’s not just one science thing. They also focused on math and literature, too,” he says.

“One of the biggest highlights was to meet two astronauts who had done space walks,” Heitschmidt says.

Owen Garriott and Story Musgrave are veteran astronauts who joined NASA nearly 40 years ago.

Garriott spent 60 days aboard SkyLab and 10 days on Spacelab-1. Musgrave has “flown in every single shuttle. He has flown six missions and was fascinating to listen to, and he also spoke at the kids’ graduation,” says Heitschmidt. “To realize you are meeting a guy (Musgrave) who helped to save the Hubble Telescope worth millions and millions of dollars. Absolutely fascinating to listen to and a great guy to talk to, all his experiences and everything. After he spoke with the teachers for two hours, I was able to sit and talk with him for a couple of minutes.”

The teacher/chaperone was not totally cut off from the Washington migrant students.

“During the week I would see the kids, and we would pass each other. We ended up doing the astronaut simulations on the same day – the gravity chair, the air packs, the things that make astronauts drift in space. We were riding these rides at the same time, so that was nice,” he says.

Overall, the academy was a life-changing experience for Heitschmidt.

“It was incredible to be there. Absolutely fascinating for me as a teacher. And part of it was to see the kids,” he says.

“On the way home we ended up missing a bus and had to wait about three hours, but we went to have dinner and I started asking them what they had learned and what they had seen. It was great. They started throwing out things they had picked up that week. They knew names, who was first in space, who was the first American in space, who was in charge of getting the rockets started. It was good to hear them talking about those things. You could see they had picked up a lot. By the last two days things had gotten so much fun that they didn’t want to leave. That’s what makes the experience worth it,” Heitschmidt says.

The main thing that will impact his teaching, he says, will be to recognize how integrated subjects have to be in the real world – or, in this case, out of the world in space exploration.

“They were teaching us that they are not just scientists out there, not just math people, but also literature people,” Heitschmidt says. “Story Musgrave actually has a degree in literature, and he talked about how they need people to write manuals and work on those areas, too. Everything they do has to be written down so they can be performed again in the exact same way.  It’s a great way to get kids excited in a whole lot of areas of education.”

Consequently, back at Housel Middle School Heitschmidt expects to make some instructional changes.

“It’s kind of habit that we teachers get into to focus only on our one subject. But you definitely see how as a math teacher I still have to emphasize language art skills in my classroom. And science goes so closely with math, we definitely need to bring that into the classroom with math. It can’t be, ‘Oh, we only do math in here. We don’t do grammar. We don’t do science.’ When you get into real life, into space exploration or any other kind of job, all those things have to be incorporated together. So all those subjects should be incorporated together in school,” he says.

Heitschmidt believes the students have a big impact on lots of other students, and their enthusiasm can have a rippling effect through an entire school.

“The students are going back and will wear their flight suits to school, and they are going to talk about this experience. One of them is doing a formal presentation as part of the Gear-Up program,” Heitschmidt says.

“When those kids start showing what they did, it’s going to get other kids saying, ‘I want to try that.’ And it’s a great way to get kids outside of the classroom learning stuff,” he says.