Meeting with astronaut is out of this world

Baldwin summer campers meet NASA astronaut

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Sitting on the carpeted floor in between museum displays that were lit up by spotlights, the students were quizzed on their space knowledge.

“Who knows what the nearest star is to Earth?” asked former NASA astronaut Bill Shepherd.

“The sun,” someone called out.

Eager to share what they knew about curves and orbits, Baldwin Middle School students raised their hands as Shepherd stood in front of a large, blown-up image of the 1969 Apollo 11 liftoff.

Shepherd, a former Babylon resident who commanded the first crew on the International Space Station, spoke with the seventh-grade students as part of a summer Science Technology Engineering and Math camp at the Cradle of Aviation Museum on July 19, during the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing.

The museum invited the students to a special question-and-answer session with Shepherd a day before Moon Fest, the museum’s celebration of the anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. Thousands of people gathered at the museum, home to a lunar excursion module like the one that carried Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the surface of the moon on July 20, 1969, to celebrate, learn about and reflect on the historic mission.

“It’s interesting because we’ve never been up there, so he’s telling us how it feels, what it’s like,” BMS student Jehovahni Alexandre said. “We wrote down eight questions on a piece of paper. He’s explaining force and gravity, the gravitational pull at the orbit.”

“I think it was educational,” Jourdon Johnson said. “Other days we would just be building something, or sometimes we just watch a video, but today I think we learned more about what it’s like in space.”

Ines Jijón, bilingual education coordinator at the museum, said the students in the STEM program, who are typically at-risk, engaged in hands-on activities relating mostly to aviation and space as part of the facility’s partnership with the school district. They conducted fun experiments, like making bottled water rockets and building model airplanes. The summer camp runs through July, and students are invited to the museum twice a week.

After meeting with the students, Shepherd recalled the start of the space race, beginning with the launch of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik 1 when he was the students’ age. He also remembered the space shuttle missions, of which he flew three, and the process of building the ISS. And he spoke at length on Apollo 11.

“I was in New England with relatives, and we stayed up late and watched the moon landing and the first space walk on TV,” Shepherd recounted. At the time he was about to turn 20.

“So the question now is, with these programs essentially behind us, what’s next? That’s what these kids are about,” he continued. “They’re very eager to learn about it. I just hope that there’s enough possibility in school programs for kids to come to places like this, because I think knowing a little bit more about what you’re looking at and why it was invented, what it did, is a really key part for teaching math and science to these kids.”

He explained how the first mission to put humans on the moon opened up doors for future missions.

“We’re going to go back to the moon, and hopefully to Mars and other places,” Shepherd said, “but understanding what was done in these earlier programs and how and why it was made to happen is what this is all about.”