Teachers In Space

Teachers in Space is inviting all interested teachers to attend the first Astronaut Teacher workshop, to be held in Washington, DC this July 17-19 as part of the Space Frontier Foundation’s NewSpace 2008 conference.  

The goal of the workshop is to begin the design of a three-week spaceflight training course for teachers who are selected to fly in space. 

Space vehicle developers indicate that spaceflight participants will need about less than one week of training before a suborbital flight. Teachers in Space has surveyed hundreds of teachers and discovered that most teachers prefer a longer training period. The survey showed most teachers prefer to spend 2-4 weeks training before flight.

Based on this survey, Teachers in Space is baselining a three-week training course for astronaut teachers. The course will include about half a week of company-mandated training and about two-and-a-half weeks of enriched educational activities created by Teachers in Space. These activities will maximize the value of the experience to teachers and increase the scope of knowledge and experience they take back to the classroom.

At the first Astronaut Teacher Workshop, participating teachers will provide input and ideas that help Teachers in Space create an initial outline for this enriched training. Teachers in Space will later validate the outline by presenting it to larger groups of teachers at future Astronaut Teacher Workshops. Future workshops will be held at various locations throughout the US.  

The first workshop will also consider ways the Astronaut Teacher training might be adapted for use in other spaceflight-related settings. For example, an abridged version of the Astronaut Teacher course might be presented to teachers who are participating in spaceflight precursor activities such as weightless ballistic flights. A version of the course might even be offered directly to students. 

To encourage teachers to attend this workshop, the Space Frontier Foundation is offering a special conference rate to participants. Teachers may register for a single-day conference pass and receive admission to the full three-day conference.

For additional details, teachers may contact Teachers in Space project manager Edward Wright at edward.v.wright@gmail.com or Don McMahon at dmcmaz@msn.com. 

XCOR Aerospace, one of the companies signed up to help take teachers to space, has just made Inc. magazine’s Inc. 500 list of fast-growing private companies. The magazine says:

Why it’s growing: Speed to market. The company strives to design, build, and test rockets on a much shorter schedule than the rest of the industry, where the norm is to conduct only a few rocket tests a year and then analyze the results at length. Among its process innovations, XCOR uses a mobile test launch pad and eschews toxic propellants, which require delicate handling.

An XCOR press release says:

XCOR’s journey from a start-up in 1999 to the Inc. 500 was not easy. Aerospace veterans Jeff Greason, Dan DeLong, Aleta Jackson, and Doug Jones formed XCOR, where they built and tested their first rocket engines on a tiny budget. The breakthrough came when the team decided to modify a pusher-propeller-powered Long EZ airplane and replace its conventional piston engine with XCOR-designed and built rocket engines. This demonstrated XCOR’s re-usable and re-startable rocket motors on actual flying hardware. The rocket plane not only proved the reliability of XCOR’s technology, it generated publicity and helped raise the firm’s profile in the aerospace industry. This attracted serious investors, including Esther Dyson and the investment group Boston Harbor Angels.

The higher profile and proven technology helped XCOR compete for and win a series of contracts with NASA and the Department of Defense. These contracts include building and testing a methane engine for NASA, and designing a suborbital space plane for the Air Force….

XCOR is currently working on a craft designed to carry people and payloads into suborbital space, but its longer term goal is to build a craft that can place them into orbit.

For the complete press release, look here.

The Teachers in Space logo is currently flying in Earth orbit, inside Bigelow Aerospace’s Genesis II prototype space station module:

http://www.bigelowaerospace.com/image_gallery/?fid=9&id=174