Teachers needed for outer space trip

Monday, September 22, 2008

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(Bay News 9)-- A new program called Teachers in Space will take American school teachers from the classroom to the sky.

The program needs two teachers to be Pathfinder Astronauts who will fly in space and then return to the classroom to teach.

The TIS program was started with the goal of flying one teacher aboard the Space Shuttle, but it ended when teacher Christa McAuliffe died in the Challenger accident of 1986.

TIS was replaced with a program called the Educator Astronaut program, which allowed former teachers to become full-time employees at NASA.

Edward Wright, the Teachers in Space project manager, wants to see the Pathfinder Astronauts back in classrooms.

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"Unlike the Educator Astronaut program, which takes teachers out of schools to join the NASA astronaut corps, we want to put astronaut teachers into American classrooms," Wright said.

The Teachers in Space program, a non-profit project of the Space Frontier Foundation and the United States Rocket Academy, is helping to make Wright's wish a reality.

Training for the program will be about three weeks long, and will take place in the summer and on weekends, which would allow teachers to keep their full-time jobs. Teachers will learn spaceflight procedures as well as developmental programs that will improve their teaching skills.

The Pathfinder Astronauts will be invited back each summer to help train new teachers who join the program.

A space shuttle will not be used for the program, but a new reusable suborbital spacecraft will carry the teachers into space. The craft is being developed by American industry and will improve safety, cut costs and allow for many teachers to make the spaceflight.

"We want to put a thousand astronaut teachers into American schools, within the next decade," Wright said.

Teachers can apply between now and Dec. 4 of this year. Training will begin in 2009 and the Pathfinder spaceflights are expected to begin in 2010 or 2011.

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