Two Area Teachers Selected for Zero-Gravity Flight

BIG STONE GAP, Va. – If they study hard today, today’s coal miners’ sons and daughters might grow up to mine the moon for the fuel of the future.
“Fusion power is extremely clean, and the only source for Helium 3 [the fuel] nearby happens to be the equatorial region of the moon,” said Jack Kennedy, the Wise County clerk of court and secretary of the board that governs Virginia’s spaceport. “There are tons.”
The going price for the material: about $1 billion a ton, he said, and it’s sitting 2 feet thick on the lunar surface. The cost of getting to it: about $80 billion.
It’s just one of the real entrepreneurial opportunities that exist when humans make the leap to space – and one of many reasons Southwest Virginia is sending two teachers up to experience zero gravity.
Kennedy said he hopes to capture the imagination of the rising generation, which he says will lead the commercial development of space.
The winners of a region-wide contest for teachers were announced here Tuesday in hopes that teachers in zero-gravity can help to inspire today’s youth to reach for the stars like the generation that put a man on the moon.
“I must admit the 9-year-old in me is jumping with anticipation and the 36-year-old in me is just a wee bit nervous,” said David Stallard, a fifth-grade teacher at Powell Valley Middle School and one of the two selected to be “a teacher astronaut trainee.”
The other winner, Gate City High School leadership teacher Rhonda Kilgore, said there’s a direct link between the future development of space technology and future technology and jobs here on Earth. “I expect to fly like Superman,” she said, “I really do.”
The two runners-up in the contest are Steve Gregory, a Chilhowie Middle School technology teacher, and Lindsey Mabe, a teacher at Powell Valley High School.
Zero-gravity flights take place on a specially modified airplane that completes a dozen or more parabolas, or aerobatic maneuvers that involve a steep climb followed by a steep descent.
During each parabola, passengers experience weightlessness for about 30 seconds – or, depending on the maneuver, can experience lunar gravity, a sixth of Earth’s gravity, or Martian gravity, a third of Earth’s gravity.
Megan Seals, a Wise County native and a fifth-grade teacher in Fairfax County who has flown in zero gravity, said the feeling is “indescribable.”
“You’re upside down, you’re sideways, you’re backwards; I had no idea which way was up and down,” she said. “They [students] can see somebody that they know having that experience; it’s much more relevant than seeing someone do the same thing on TV.”
In the 21st century, Kennedy said spaceflight technology will be a higher-stakes game than it was during the 20th. Rather than competing in a race to achieve a single technological feat, the United States will compete for its economic survival.
A region that celebrates its high school athletic stars now has a chance through academics to “literally put a child into the stars.”
According to a report released in February for the Federal Aviation Administration, Virginia is leading the way with incentives for commercial space travel.
The report credits two bills – the Virginia Space Liability and Immunity Act of 2007 and the Zero G Zero Tax Act of 2008 – with helping to get the state’s space transportation industry off the ground.
The laws help reduce insurance costs and create a tax exemption on profits from business at Virginia’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Accomack County. Southwest Virginia legislators spearheaded both efforts, Kennedy said.
“I think that spaceflight is going to become more and more common, and because of that, it’s very important that you all as students, you concentrate on science, technology and math so you can become a player in these areas,” state Delegate Terry Kilgore, R-Gate City, told the students assembled at Powell Valley Middle School for Tuesday’s announcement.
Seals, who attended middle school here about a decade ago, had the kids abuzz when she showed them a video of people in zero gravity – and she asked them to imagine the future.
“When I was here, I never thought I would become such a space geek,” she said. “Never.”
Now, she knows how easy it is in lunar gravity to push herself to the ceiling using her little finger – and she says the top five jobs in 2020 will all be things that don’t yet exist.
In 2030, there might be daily flights from the Earth to the moon, with hotels on the moon and in space. There could be zero-gravity sports centers orbiting the earth, for variations on football, basketball and NASCAR racing that have yet to be invented.
As human civilization expands to space, new inventions will be needed in all aspects of life, she said – new musical instruments, new forms of transportation, zero-gravity fashions.
And here, where just about every kid has a family member who works in the coal mines, she made a point to say the technology already is being developed for mining on asteroids and the moon – and it won’t be long before workers are needed in space.
“We’re going to need someone to do all these jobs,” she said. “How can you make it happen? The first thing you need to do is stop thinking you’re too cool or don’t have time for science and math.”
Kids here also have an added incentive. Kennedy said his hope is that next year, teachers and students from the area will have a chance to fly in zero gravity – and bring their experiences home.
It’s not just cool for kids to get excited about math and science, he said, it’s also key to America’s future.
“If we fail to educate properly … and develop careers for youth in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the Chinese and Indians will fill the void in the coming part of the century,” Kennedy said.
“It will not only impact space exploration but science and research more generally, which has a profound impact on a robust economy. We need to have an advanced, robust economy. It spurs our country forward competitively and provides a higher level of productivity, and we’ve got to come to that realization.”
He said the generation excited by the lunar landings has been left behind as the space program was grounded to Earth’s orbit – but the next generation’s space program can create the same excitement not only for the feats to be achieved, but for the money to be made by those who aren’t too timid to reach for the stars.
“There’s a lot of frustration I think generally in the country in coming to terms with the fact that our economy has lagged,” Kennedy said. “To turn everything around, we’ve got to have a growing economy, and the only way to have a growing economy is to nurture technological and scientific innovation, period. Without it, we’re dead.”
Seals said a new age of fast-paced technological innovation is possible – and kids in Southwest Virginia have as good a chance as any of being the ones to make it happen.
“The most important thing you can be doing is never stop wondering because your ‘I wonders’ are going to become all of our future,” she said. “You’re going to make it happen, and you’re going to be the ones that make our world really cool.”