Packed house turns out at UVa-Wise for chat with space station astronauts
WISE — School children from across Southwest Virginia packed the University of Virginia’s College at Wise’s new Convocation Center on Thursday to share the unique thrill of a chat with astronauts aboard the International Space Station.
A projected crowd of at least 3,000 was well above that, as an overflow throng of kids of all ages from across the region — including Wise, Lee, Scott, Dickenson and Buchanan counties — filled the seats and much of the new arena’s concourse to share some time with astronauts Dan Burbank and Don Pettit.
Burbank serves as International Space Station commander, while Pettit described some of his duties as “chief cook and bottle washer” for the orbiting station.
Currently earthbound astronaut Leland D. Melvin, a former professional football player turned space explorer, fired the kids up just before the space station downlink beamed images of Burbank and Pettit in the station. Melvin served as a mission specialist aboard two space shuttle missions and currently serves as the associate administrator for education with NASA.
“All of you are the next generation of space explorers,” Melvin told his enthusiastic army of listeners.
A few students were chosen to pose questions to Burbank and Pettit. The latter said he put himself on the path to becoming an astronaut when he was a kid taking “fun subjects in school like math, science and engineering.”
Being a scientist and an engineer are careers that intrigue him, Pettit said, “but it was the explorer part of my heart is what drove me to be an astronaut.”
Burbank said NASA’s destiny is to develop a manned space launch system with the ability to explore deep space. He said while he would be “thrilled to go to the moon,” he couldn’t “get to Mars fast enough.”
Pettit said he would “go to Mars in a heartbeat if the opportunity presented itself.”
Burbank told students an extended stay on the space station doesn’t get old. With over 80 days in space including a number of shuttle missions, Burbank said orbiting the earth “is always different. It’s never the same. You never get bored with it. You never get tired of it.”
The communications downlink lasted about 25 minutes, and the kids were spellbound. But their favorite part was right at the end when Melvin asked Burbank and Pettit, who had remained stationary throughout, to demonstrate weightlessness before they signed off.
Pettit promptly sailed toward and off camera, feet first, while Burbank did a somersault, and the resulting cheers nearly lifted the roof off UVa-Wise’s brand-new $30 million arena, an exuberance that surged again when Pettit reappeared on camera, feet first, sailing on his back through the space station.
Other space explorer presenters at Thursday’s downlink event included Anousheh Ansari, a successful businesswoman who paid for a space flight; Dr. Billie Reed, executive director of Virginia’s Commercial Spaceflight Authority and the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport; Amanda Cutright, a NASA engineer working on “space brakes” technologies; and Adam Sanders, a 2002 Powell Valley High School graduate who helped develop Robonaut 2 (R2), a humanoid robot now aboard the International Space Station.
Sanders’ parents, Mike and Debbie Sanders of Big Stone Gap, attended Thursday’s downlink and were justifiably proud of their son. Mike said when Adam was a “very young man, whatever he had he took it apart and put it back together. Not everything got completely put back together, and it may have had additional parts of other things, but that’s just what he would do.”
Sanders’ parents said their son wrote a computer program for a school project in just the fifth grade. His mother said Adam is “not only a smart young man, he’s a fine individual” to which his father chimed, “We may be a little prejudiced in our opinion.”
Debbie Sanders assured her husband they certainly weren’t.
Meanwhile, home-schoolers Colton Culbertson, 8; Laken Culbertson, 11; and Tessa Culbertson, 13, of Norton, joined their public school counterparts in Thursday’s event. Colton said he would love to go “jumping around on the moon,” while Laken said space studies happen to be on the current home schooling study plan.
“I think it’s just very cool they brought all this stuff here to get kids more interested to learn about math and technology,” said Tessa. “And I’m real interested to see real astronauts in space.”
The kids’ grandmother, Connie Culbertson, said the International Space Station downlink was “a unique opportunity for our students and young people from all across our area.”
Wise County School Superintendent Jeff Perry said the downlink event was the sort of thing that doesn’t come around often, and he was glad many of the region’s students could be exposed to it.
“This is certainly a special thing. There’s always been a lure and a mystique with space and space travel, and something like this provides students with an opportunity to explore those avenues,” Perry said. “This is just a unique opportunity for students in our region. They don’t always have an opportunity to experience something like this, and we certainly appreciate everyone’s efforts to make this happen.”
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