Twenty years ago, the Challenger space shuttle blew apart in the sky, terrifying witnesses and shocking the astronauts' families.
The Challenger mission featured the premiere of the Teacher in Space Project. Commander Dick Scobee, pilot Mike Smith and astronauts Ellison Onizuka, Judy Resnik, Ron McNair and Greg Jarvis joined Christa McAuliffe, New Hampshire high school teacher, on the 1986 mission.
The families collaborated to carry on their loved ones' dream of providing education to future generations by creating the not-for-profit Challenger Center in 1988. The Indianapolis Challenger Learning Center of Decatur Township educates children about space by allowing them to command their own mission. The Decatur center is the 51st Challenger Center in the United States. Missions at the center look to the future of space. This week teams are building a model of an orbiter, Flight Director Cindy Moriarty said.
"It's the future; we can't limit ourselves just to Earth. There's more out there," she said of the importance of educating children about space. The center does not focus on the Challenger accident, but instead on the personal sacrifices the astronauts on all missions have to make, she said.
"We just explain to them that working and living in space doesn't belong to people that are weak at heart," Moriarty said. "They have to be brave people and the only way we can move into the future is to be brave and be willing to make sacrifices."
Thursday, sixth grade students from Neil A. Armstrong Elementary in Mooresville simulated mission control and shuttle activities at the center.
Ball State University alumna Sheila Corbin is a Flight Director at the center. She said the students' objective for the day was to search for Comet Encke-similar to Challenger's mission to examine Halley's comet.
Carolyn Sumners, curator of astronomy at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, helped design the first Challenger Center in Houston, Texas. She also trained each astronaut since 1980 to identify stars while in space to maintain altitude on the shuttle.
Sumners, who has a doctorate in education, said she finds it difficult to educate younger generations about the meaning of the space program because the children now weren't alive to see the missions. The Jan. 28, 1986 flight served as inspiration to educate future generations of astronauts in Indiana. However, convincing a new generation that they are the future is difficult when the space program stalls after a tragedy.
"People do lose interest, do lose awareness of a program, unless they're continually fed information about it," she said.
"The kids who were born in the 1980s pretty much live with what they knew right now," she said.
Sumners said when she taught children who were not alive in the 1970s; it was similar because the children didn't have a personal memory in 1969 of the Apollo launch.
Not having an active shuttle program is a problem encouraging education about space, she said.
"It's very hard to tell that story when you don't have any progress on the ground," she said. Sumners added NASA has "a lot going on that's very positive" with talk of returning to the moon and exploring Mars.
Discovery will return to space in May 2006, according to NASA's Web site; the shuttle was also the first manned flight into space after Columbia in July 2005.
Pat Donovan, Flight Director at the Indianapolis center, said Indiana does not focus on space science, and this program is a way to get children to think about careers in space. Students can also learn they may be interested in careers on Earth by being a pilot, air-traffic controller or working at mission control, he said.
The lack of focus on space science does not deter Donovan from thinking positively about the future of the space program. He said NASA is entering an exciting time with talk about returning to the moon and Mars, and the children he interacts with will be in control.
"This is the generation that's going to do it," he said.
To encourage education about space science in Decatur, all fifth grade students in the township participate at the Challenger Center, Donovan said.
Challenger was brought down just after liftoff by a poorly designed seal in the shuttle's solid rocket booster, which has since been redesigned and has performed without problems. It will be used on the next-generation vehicle with plans to return astronauts to the moon and later to Mars, according to the Associated Press.
Kelsey Mulvehill, 12, worked on the medical team Thursday at the Challenger Center. She said though accidents like the Challenger are sad, the United States should still continue missions.
"You won't learn anything if you don't try out everything," she said.
The Challenger mission was a part of the Teacher in Space Project, where teachers from around the country competed to be the first teacher to teach from space. Christa McAuliffe was that finalist.
During the selection process, teachers suggested lesson plans in space. One of those was to bring toys into space, but that was already in progress, Sumners said.
In April 1985, the Discovery space shuttle launched the first Toys in Space program to educate children about physics. Sumners created the Toys in Space program. One of the featured toys was a gyroscope made by TEDCO, a toy company in Hagerstown, which is about 40 minutes southeast of Muncie.
Gyroscopes are critical to astronauts, Sumners said. The three large circular objects at the rear of shuttles are a form of gyroscopes, which help keep the shuttle in position. A toy gyroscope can balance on any edge. The gyroscope that flew with the crew appeared in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, TEDCO Sales Director Jane Shadle said.
Shadle helped TEDCO with the Toys in Space program since Sumners contacted the company.
Toys in Space concentrates on the effect of microgravity on Earth and in space. Microgravity, when objects appear to float, could not be demonstrated on Earth, so Sumners convinced NASA it was necessary to let astronauts tape their experiments in space.
Children view the tapes in a classroom and ask questions and guess what would happen to the toys in space.
Astronauts playing with toys may not come off well to the public, so it was important that the astronauts were serious about their work, Sumners said.
Regardless of how serious the mission was, in the conference room at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, the astronauts "were like kids" when they worked with the toys, Shadle said.
"We worked from the bottom up," she said. "We had a committed crew of astronauts that were willing to give up their spare time." The crew's experiment with the toys had to be done while on break from their mission, Sumners added.
The earliest the program could resume was 1988, two years after the Challenger accident. In 1993, Toys in Space II launched on the Endeavor and returned to space most recently in 2002 on the International Space Station.
Now, the Toys in Space program faces delays producing a DVD version in space because of the Columbia tragedy and other problems at NASA, Sumners said.
Making a "cheerful, playful" video is also a problem considering NASA's criticism, she said.
As successful as the programs are, Sumners said there is no sure way knowing if any kids who participated at the Challenger Center or interacted with Toys in Space lessons worked for NASA. However, she does keep track of one who has-her second son, Jon.
"He's now an engineer making accelerometers that fly on shuttles to prevent another disaster," she said.
Moriarty also remains positive despite disasters like Challenger's. She said she knew NASA would return to space stronger.
"At first I saw it as a tragedy and became discouraged, fearful," she said. "But over time, it was a gift they gave us."
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