ScienceMakers Toolkit Manual - The History Makers

Clip 4 - Getting Youth Interested: With students, I try to get them to see that math and science can be fun.
Every summer, I take all the high school students who are working here and all the college students who are
working here and I take them for one day and put them together in our auditorium. And what I do is I do just
like Ms. McKnight did with me, I start playing games. I’ll have brain teasers, mind games that I play with them.
Put them in groups, and have them laughing about some of the problems and the results that come from those,
and word puzzles, and then I tell them what they can do if they stick with those math and science courses and
the doors that will be open to them. I also then ask them to talk with the scientists and engineers here about
what they do, and get our scientists and engineers to not put it in those lofty terms, put it in general terms that
people are going to understand. For example, I try to get them to understand that in the fi eld of aeronautics, one
thing that’s important is that jet engines have to be quieter because there are noise standards and people are concerned
about the noise around airports. So we’re trying to work on projects that will quiet jet engines such that
if you’re in the vicinity of the airport, that you really don’t notice that the airport is there. That we confi ne the
noise from those engines to the profi le or the footprint of the airport itself. We talk about energy effi ciency, how
can we get these jet engines to be more fuel effi cient. Those are the kinds of things that we try to do and everyone
can relate to that in terms of the fl ow through. Trying to develop programs such that you don’t have to have
these delays in airports because of fog, or because of inclement weather, that you’re able to have instrumentation
that can see through that. Those are some real life experiences that students and everyone can get their,
around which people can get their arms [around] and understand that those are the kinds of things we can do,
as well as looking at space exploration which is critical to getting minorities in the astronaut program, females
in the astronaut programs, and we get those astronauts to go out to the schools, especially if they’re from that
particular population, and let students see people who look like them, who are in these disciplines and we try to
make sure that we do as much of that as we can.
Clip 5 - Astronaut Selection: When I applied for the astronaut program in 1977, there were over 8,000 applicants
and they selected about 20 to 25. So, it is a very, very competitive process to become an astronaut. In fact,
when I applied, it was the fi rst time they opened up the astronaut corps up to non-pilots. Prior to that, you had to
be military and you had to be a pilot. But then, they opened it up to civilians for mission specialists. So now, the
technical background is a general requirement. Most of those astronauts have a Master’s degree as a minimum,
but they also opened it up to educated astronauts and this time, we’ve selected teachers who actually enter the
astronaut corps and they’re educator astronauts. So, they have been teachers in elementary or high schools
or schools throughout the nation. They get selected and they go through the exact same training and become
certifi ed as astronauts with the intent that after they leave the astronaut corps, then they will have an impact on
education and perhaps go back into the education system.
Clip 6 - Space Shuttle Columbia: We are now in the process within NASA of returning safely to fl ight. There
was the Columbia accident investigation board that issued a report about the things we need to do to safely
return to fl ight. We have implemented those recommendations. Just last Friday, the external tank was shipped
down to Kennedy Space Center, and we’re targeting an April or May time frame for returning shuttles safely to
fl ight. But it was a great loss to the nation and to the agency and particularly for NASA Research Center because
Columbia was on a science mission, unlike many of the missions that are destined for the space station
for construction of the space station. This was a mission that was in lower orbit that had science experiments,
what we call micro-gravity experiments, and those experiments were from NASA Glenn Research Center here
in Cleveland. So those astronauts had come back and forth to Cleveland getting oriented on the experiments.
So when we lost them, it was really a special blow to us because they were like family members for us with our
experiments that were fl ying on Columbia.
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Physics