Broadcast across the Wachusett Regional School District in Sterling, Princeton, Paxton, Rutland, and Holden, on Friday, February 9, students across several schools had the chance to hear their own questions answered by two astronauts, Flight Engineer Loral O’Hara and Commander Andreas “Andy” Mogensen, live on the International Space Station. The twenty minute Q&A session, termed a “downlink”, was arranged by district school psychologist Beth Foley in partnership with NASA’s Johnson Space Center In-Flight Education program.
“I had been working with the Civil Air Patrol to get rocketry supplies for the students. I wanted them to have the hands-on experience of building and flying rockets,” Foley said. “[The students] were very enthusiastic; this led me to start thinking outside the box about what else might pique their interests about space and STEAM. I reached out to my contact at Civil Air Patrol and she listened to my idea…she offered me an email to NASA.”
STEAM, or Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics, forms a core spotlight of the school district’s educational plans. Principal Alfred Thompson of Thomas Prince Elementary School found the downlink event to be in line with the district’s goals.
“There’s a focus on STEAM activities through the school year,” Thompson said.”[The downlink] generated a lot of questions from students. It’s pretty cool to see and hear astronauts answering.”
Beyond building anticipation for the event, Foley noted that gaining NASA’s approval not only for student questions, but to be selected as participants, was a long and involved process.
“I [had] never communicated with NASA before,” Foley said of the application process. “They were very helpful, as I had a steep learning curve on their processes and requirements. The student questions [were] impressive and well thought out…the students were excited as we submitted their questions and heard they were accepted.”
Foley credited Wachusett school district teachers Jamie Hughes of Central Tree Middle School and Julie Roczniak of Thomas Prince as part of the application, saying, “[The process] was long, because I had never done anything like this before. [NASA] was asking for lesson plans, which I as a school psychologist don’t do. I enlisted the help of Jaime Hughes for a lesson plan and Julie Roczniak helped me align the state standards with the proposal.”
While astronomy and aeronautics wasn’t the primary focus of the semester’s current lesson plans, Foley confirmed that the ISS and general space are part of STEAM curriculum standards. In the spirit of preparing for the downlink, teachers talked about space ahead of time to stoke further interest. The school IT department had a hand in setting up connections across classrooms for the NASA TV Live broadcast, and bulletin boards around the school announced the upcoming downlink and district participation.
The International Space Station, the largest space station yet built, was a collaborative effort of fifteen countries over ten years to assemble in low Earth orbit, sitting typically 254 miles above the planet. The station has been in operation since 2000, with seven years left of usability. In 2031, the ISS will be disassembled and sent back to Earth by crashing into the Pacific Ocean. Other stations, such as the commercial space station Starlab, and NASA’s proposed Lunar Gateway station, will eventually fill the gap left by the ISS’s decommissioning. Until its retirement, the ISS will continue to host astronauts from across the world: its current mission, Expedition 70, has the mission goals of “[studying] an array of microgravity phenomena to benefit humans living on and off the Earth…[astronauts] will also explore heart health, cancer treatments, space manufacturing techniques, and more during their long-duration stay in Earth orbit”, per the official NASA mission summary.
As communications with the ISS are a delicate balancing act of connectivity and orbital location, questions from students were pre-recorded and sent to the astronauts to be answered live. Instead of typical questions such as ‘how does an astronaut sleep in space?’, student submissions varied from asking when and why the ISS was built to spacewalk safety protocols, and were answered earnestly and with clear enjoyment by O’Hara and Mogensen.
Elementary-grade student Gabriella Tibeau asked, “The ocean remains largely unexplored; do you feel there are things we can learn from space that will help us explore the ocean?”
O’Hara, whose engineering specialties include deep sea research, answered, “There’s a lot of crossover between ocean science and space science. [Ocean and space] scientists are already working together and learning from each other. One of my favorite areas of research right now is ocean worlds, [and] studying oceans on other planets. Scientists are sharing technologies and the methodologies they use to conduct their research and their exploration in order to better understand both how we can explore Earth’s oceans better, and then also someday oceans on other planets.”
Another student, Jay Spanetelot, asked what many people are most curious about regarding space travel: “When you’re launching a spacecraft with you and your colleagues, do you feel any fear? If so, does that fear fade once you’re in space?
Mogensen, a seasoned astronaut with over 208 days logged in space, answered: “I think fear is a completely natural thing; all humans feel fear. The important thing is how you react to it. Through our training, we learned to set aside fear and maybe even use it in a positive way to heighten our senses, to react quicker, [and] to think quicker. The really important thing is that you don’t let fear consume you [and] don’t let it become panic, in which case you typically respond in a slower, poor manner. Fear is completely normal. The important thing is how you use it [and] how you respond to it.
Towards the end of the downlink, student Joseph Wadeen asked, “What are the pros and cons of being an astronaut?”
“I think there are a lot of pros, I don’t know about cons,” O’Hara replied, with optimism and enthusiasm. “I love exploration and the discovery and the adventure that it brings. I love being part of something that’s so much bigger than myself, like the International Space Station program, that brings countries together doing something that we work for the benefit of humanity. If you have to come up with some cons, if you don’t like traveling it’s probably not the job for you.”
The downlink ended with thanks to Foley and In-Flight Education, as well as thanks to the Wachusett school district for its participation. While no future plans with NASA downlinks are in the works for the district, with spaceflight operations such as the upcoming Artemis lunar landing missions, there are many opportunities for students, teachers, and space enthusiasts alike to keep looking skyward.