Students encouraged
to take up space
Astronaut in-training shares experiences
with schoolchildren
SHERRY CONOHAN NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman (l) holds up a lemon-lime drink, an example of the space food astronauts eat while aboard the space shuttle, during a presentation to children in the Shrewsbury School. Rep. Rush Holt holds a box with other samples of food for space flight.
SHREWSBURY — When NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman finished his presentation on his preparation for travel in space and asked for questions, the very first one, from a little girl in the front of the gymnasium at the Shrewsbury School, cut right to the chase: How do you go to the bathroom in a spaceship?
Reisman was prepared. He immediately advanced his slide projector to the next picture which showed an elaborate toilet surrounded by all sorts of gizmos.
"Instead of gravity, you have a little bit of suction to help you out," he explained.
Reisman came to the school last Friday with Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.), who is a physicist. Before introducing Reisman, Holt told the assembly of children in the gym from all over the school that science is all about asking good questions and then conducting tests to get the answers.
Holt cited the example of Isidor Isaac Rabi, who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1944. He said when Rabi was growing up on the Lower East Side of New York, his parents didn’t ask him when he got home from school, "What did you learn today?" as other parents asked their children.
His parents asked him, "Did you ask a good question today?" Holt said.
"Science is asking questions that you can later test," the congressman said. "It’s easy to ask a question, but to ask it in a way that you can do experiments to test it, is what science is about."
The Shrewsbury School was the first of four schools around Holt’s central New Jersey district that the team would visit during the day. Reisman is a native of Parsippany who holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the California Institute of Technology.
Reisman, who wore the blue jumpsuit of the astronaut corps, said he had been an astronaut with NASA for four years and expected to study for two more years before he goes up in space. He showed two videos and slide pictures from a slide projector to illustrate what his training consists of.
Reisman asked how many of the children wanted to be astronauts, and many hands went up.
"It you want to be an astronaut, you must do well in school," he counseled them. "Study real hard right now, particularly science and math."
Training as an astronaut is good for getting into business later in life, he said.
Reisman explained that before candidates are selected to be astronauts, they go down to Houston, Texas, for a week, "and they figure out if you have the right stuff" to be one.
With pictures, he showed some of the tests he took, such as the treadmill and the eye, dental and hearing exams. Since the space shuttle is a small, tight place with six people squeezed into an area the size of a large closet, they put you inside a big white ball to see your reaction.
"I was tired so I just slept," he said.
Reisman said his class consists of 31 astronauts, and he showed a picture of the group. On one side of him, he said, was Barbara Morgan, a schoolteacher and the first trainee in the teacher-in-space program since the program was reinstated, and on the other side of him was Brazil’s first astronaut. The teacher-in-space program was suspended after Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher from New Hampshire died when the Challenger space shuttle blew up in 1985.
Reisman said there also are astronauts from Canada, Germany, Italy and all over the world.
"You hear about problems in the world," he observed. "At least in our little part of the world, we’re all getting along."
Reisman showed a video of the training he and the other astronauts have been undergoing, and explained how they experienced weightlessness while flying in an airplane that makes a steep climb and then dives.
It also showed their survival training. A student asked why they go through that. He said they fly on T-38 jets and on "a bad day," they might have to bail out with the help of a rocket.
"If you do that, you might land in a wilderness area, and you have to be able to take care of yourself for a few days until help arrives," he said.
"Also, like you, we spend a lot of time in the classroom," he continued. "The space shuttle is really, really complicated, and they expect you to know it inside and out."