President's Message

I occasionally hear a lament from the pro-space community that young people aren't interested in space anymore. The argument goes that the Internet has captured the fancy of today's youth and that they would rather surf the web than go out and do what's necessary to reach the stars.

OASIS volunteers Bill Ernoehazy and Steve Bartlett talk to scouts about space careers. Photo courtesy Steve Bartlett.

While it is true that a lot people spend much of their time on the 'Net, there are quite a number of programs around the country that involve students from elementary school through university level in space projects. These projects include: competitions to design space habitats; connecting students to world-class telescopes via the Web to perform astronomical research; building small satellites and attached payloads for launch into space; designing, building, and flying rockets; collecting imagery from orbiting satellites and space probes; among others.

Two such projects in the Greater Los Angeles area are the space habitat design team at Cerritos High School and the rocket project at California State University, Long Beach. In the Cerritos High program, students participate in a national competition to design space habitats for specific locations. Past locations have been the L5 position in Earth orbit, on the surface of the Moon, and on the surface of Mars. The students are responsible for coming up with a feasible design, working out how it will be built and maintained, determining how it will be financed, and deciding on the mix of crew skills necessary to build and operate it. The competition guidelines require the students to prepare and present a proposal for their project to an evaluation committee. This committee is composed of government, industry, and education professionals who review and critique both the proposals and the presentations. Cerritos High team members are flying to Cape Canaveral, Florida for this year's competition. Mr. Phil Turek is the faculty advisor for the team.

The Cal State Long Beach rocket project allows students to build and fly a large liquid rocket from a site in the Mojave desert. The program, run under the auspices of the Aerospace Engineering department and with support from Garvey Spacecraft Corporation, has been in operation for over three years. In that time, students have successfully built, static fired, and flown two liquid oxygen/ethanol rockets (dubbed Prospector 1 and 2) and are nearly finished with their third. Some of the concepts being tested include aerospike engines, sophisticated command and telemetry systems, composite airframes, and reliable recovery systems.

A few of the other student space projects that come to mind: the long-running student rocket project at Fredricksburg High School in Texas, the student payload program at the University of Southern California, the small satellite program at Utah State University, and the student-built satellite and rocket programs at the Air Force Academy.

In all cases, the students are motivated and excited to be working on these projects. They put in long hours and have come up with quite a number of innovations to meet cost and weight constraints. Two common features in all successful programs are a short development cycle (typically two years or less) to ensure that the students can see the fruits of their labors before they graduate and a committed faculty member to ensure that things run smoothly.

Anyone who believes that young people aren't interested in space should visit one of these groups to see where real enthusiasm lies.

Steve Bartlett