Fort Worth Academy students talk with astronauts on the International Space Station
Students packed into the Fort Worth Academy auditorium Thursday morning, watching a live map of the International Space Station’s route in orbit of the earth and listening to chatter between the station and Houston.
Students from kindergarten to eighth grade lined a wall. When the three American astronauts appeared on screen, they asked questions ranging from their experiences to the science they are practicing in low Earth orbit.
The video call with the station was a part of Fort Worth Academy’s annual space week. On Thursday, they had a chance to ask real astronauts, traveling at about 5 miles per second above the planet, about the things they’ve learned. NASA does these events twice a month.
The first question came from one of the younger students.
“What’s it like to bounce around in space?” he asked.
Drew Morgan, one of the three Americans on the station and an officer in the U.S. Army, said simply that it’s fun. Then he demonstrated, tucking his legs like he was going to do a cannonball while his fellow American space explorers, Jessica Meir and Christina Koch, tossed him back and forth effortlessly.
It elicited some laughter from the kids. A teacher at the front of the room held up a sign that read “Quiet,” the emoji of a monkey covering his mouth underneath the word.
Another student asked if water gets you wet in space or just bounces off. They again demonstrated, squeezing water out of a bag. It turned into a bubble, no gravity to force it to fall, and it floated around. Meir pushed the bubble toward Morgan. While most of it bounced off his shirt, he was left with a wet spot on his chest.
“So as you can see, it does both,” Morgan said.
Other questions were more serious.
How will experiments conducted on the International Space Station help with a lunar outpost, which NASA hopes to have by 2024? Life support systems are a big part of that.
How do you experiment with gravity and micro gravity in space? Observing the way blood interacts inside the body when in micro gravity is a big focus.
In between questions, the astronauts left their microphone floating in front of them. They hovered just above the floor — or wall or ceiling, depending on your orientation in space.
The video call, called a “down link,” was an event three years in the making. Many of the teachers referred to it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Science teacher Laruen Parker, a Fort Worth Academy alumna, had submitted proposals for the event twice a year since 2016. Each time she received a critique of the proposal pointing out small things that needed to be changed or added.
Shannon Elders, head of school for the academy, said the space station making a down link with a grade school isn’t common. Most of the calls are to conferences or universities.
“This was a big opportunity for our students to ask questions aligned with their own experiments,” Elders said. “We’re teaching kids with space, not just about space.”
Fort Worth Academy describes itself as a project-based school. This call to the International Space Station is special, but it’s not out of the ordinary, Parks said.
Students during space week constructed small patches of a space suit, practiced walking around in gear that simulates the bulkiness and feel of the suits, and tried out some of the tasks astronauts have to complete. Last year, students built a Mars habitat based off their reading of the book “The Martian,” later adapted into a movie starring Matt Damon.
This year, they’ve created a lunar colony module of sorts where they learn about previous moon landings and the most likely strategies and challenges astronauts will face when trying to establish an outpost on Earth’s only natural satellite.