Educating The Next Generation Of Space Explorers

1. This makes me SO sad. I’m a foreigner in New Zealand who grew up intensely interested in the American Space Program(s). In the 1970s and 1980s, I wrote to NASA information offices and also contractors such as Rockwell International, Lockheed and Grumman about Apollo spacecraft and the Shuttle. NASA Public Affairs sent me some nice stuff, even though they didn’t have to – I wasn’t a U.S. citizen and the postage to N.Z. cannot have been cheap.

   The various U.S. Space Programs have provided two generations of fascination to young people not just in America; but all over the world. Will nobody fight for this educational resource? Will nobody champion this nearly priceless opportunity to inspire the future? In part because of cutbacks like this: the internet is literally FULL of trolls and ‘Flat Earth’ types attacking NASA websites 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. It is an organized campaign. It is particularly prevalent on what I call Farcebook – when NASA puts up a notification about the Mars Rovers, the DC-8 aircraft flying around the world doing pollution air sampling, the changing face of dwarf planet Ceres or the Juno observations of Jupiter… The very first comments out of the gate are ALWAYS “NASA lies”, “Fake garbage – the Earth is known to be flat”, “there is no such things as planets, moons or space”, and today’s prize winner; “There is no such thing as the South Pole”. And NASA video postings on YouTube get it even worse.

   I wish to God I were making this up. But I’m not. Who will stand up for real science and history when the educational resources for these things are gone? How will the growing ignorance be countered if there IS NO countering voice – of any sort?! I’m not a voice ‘crying in the wilderness’ who is worrying too much about little or nothing. Somebody HAS to take this stuff seriously! I sincerely wish that Congress people and Senators will stand up and make loud, public statements against the ignorance. I hope SOMEONE will champion the future of NASA’s education resources and it’s potential countering of the cancer of blithering idiocy that is spreading hard and fast, every day.

   Yours Sincerely; Matthew Pavletich, Auckland, New Zealand.

   1. As long as education and space keep popping up I guess I can plug my 2015 paper: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/a…

   2. It’s much worse than you describe.

      Here in America we have already abrogated our responsibility to higher education. Florida sees cuts year after year after year, all due to a tax-cut happy governor. Across the country students are carrying $1.2 TRILLION in debt.

      Yesterday my housekeeper showed up with a new assistant – her niece. I’ve known this girl since she was born. She is 23 now, dropped out of FGCU because $500 tuition per month was more than she could earn while in school. Plus books, by the way.

      I graduated with a Master’s degree, having worked nearly full time, and still had $20k to pay back. That’s nothing compared to what kids are doing these days.

      1. In some cases, state funding for public universities almost doesn’t matter. The University of Colorado system only gets a bit under 20% of their budget from the state. Tuition, endowments and research contracts and grants are what pay most of the bills. And, yes, this does contribute to high tuition (mostly for out-of-state students.) I’ve heard people at other public universities say they’d almost be better off buying the land and buildings from the state and becoming a private university.

         1. The All Funds percentage of state support figure is pretty misleading. State support is best measured by per-FTE state funding adjusted for CPI. Using All Funds artificially reduces the percentage of state support when significant sums are generated by auxiliaries (e.g., football) or research grants. Using HEPI (a higher education measure of inflation) rather than CPI implies that higher education should receive a growing share of state support because it is unable to restrain cost growth. I don’t know about the Colorado case but in Texas per-FTE student state support adjusted for CPI has been pretty consistent over many years.

2. Back in the early 1990s, my wife and I took a trip to KSC. Since she had a teaching degree, we stopped at the education office there. Since this was pre-Internet, she left with a stack of photocopies of lesson plans of all sorts acquired by and produced by the NASA Education Office. She was quite grateful.

   It’s sad to think that the Administration would deny future generations of teachers access to similar materials to help them inspire the next generation of scientists, engineers, and etc.

   1. At one time the Florida Space Research Institute had an educational program which was similarly focused on supporting existing teachers in elementary and high schools with training and resources related to space, and by extension STEM education.

      1. Florida Space Research Institute, KSC Education and most of the KSC public affairs office are funded mainly by KSC Visitor Admissions charges and not by NASA federal government funds. Other space centers are not as fortunate as KSC in having the tourism cash cow that can support their programs.

3. “They seem to think that education is not worth an emphasis.” Actually, given the past 50 years of lower and now upper education system degradation, NO ONE seems to think that education is worth the emphasis based on public voting behaviors and political appointee actions. Throw in the exponential 50 year “technology-human” experiment variables and you get a general recipe for a future disaster.
   On a related note, I gave some lectures at a combined elementary and middle school in Lusaka Zambia after climbing Kilimanjaro in 2005 and it was amazing to see how the children reacted and were so enthusiastic to have someone all the way from the American space program come talk to them directly. If we as a culture and society don’t learn how to foster basic human motivation and show a hopeful and prosperous future in STEM and education in general, then we completely deserve what we allow to happen.

   1. The problem in education is not the spending on it, it’s what kids are taught in school today. In my classes I have students that know nothing about history except a few dates without any context to them. I have had to create a history class for our business degree just so undergraduate students know who Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, William Boeing, etc. are and how they made the modern world. And where the technology they aren’t able to live without came from. And their knowledge of basic economics simply doesn’t exist.

      BTW when teaching STEM, don’t forget the industrialists who made those advances in STEM possible. This is why the Romans and the Greeks never moved their STEM out of the academies and into society, there were no entrepreneurs to guide the transition that created the iterative cycle of technological progress. It’s why Hero’s steam engine was just a curiosity, not the foundation of a Roman Industrial Revolution.

      1. Since the private sector seems to be doing a better job than NASA at launch vehicle development, I don’t see why they can’t do a better job at STEM education. Sufficiently rich people can (and have) set up trust funds to support scholarships, have endow faculty positions (often with a stipulation on what sort of work the funded person should work on), etc. Some sufficiently rich people have even established entire universities. And this can go far beyond philanthropy; companies have an interest in making sure the people applying for jobs have the necessary education. (And, scholarships and internships are an established recruiting tool.)

         And, if someone hasn’t done it already, does anyone know how I could send Mr. Owura Kwadwo Hottish a used Windows laptop I’ve got lying around? It’s eight years old, but he could get way more use out of it that it gets gathering dust in my office.

         1. The problem is the near monopoly states have on K-12 education, the most important years. Yes, I agree that private enterprise could do better and have worked on a startup in the past that was focused on it, but it’s hard to break down through that monopoly.

            1. The states do NOT have a monopoly on education. Here in Florida anyone who wants to take a crack at it can set up a charter school and grab tax dollars for themselves, or go completely private and claim they have something better to offer. A few charters are good, the majority are no better than public schools and many are worse.

               Education is not simple, and it is certainly not a simple way to make money. My son had developmental problems and the public school system did a phenomenal job of helping him, with speech therapy when he was four, supplementary tutoring when he was seven, and a program called “learning strategies” when he was in high school.

               By all means, if you think you can do a better job, have at it. If you don’t have the resources to start a school, participate in your local school district and become a volunteer or run for school board. But please don’t complain that you were shut out or that anything associated with government is a failure. Government is whatever we can accomplish as responsible citizens working together.

            2. Indeed. And like the US Post Office, which is poorly compared with Fedex et.al., public schools accept every single citizen. And they rightly spend enormous funds to help kids- like yours- needing extra help.

            3. School systems spend that money only because they were forced to by the many lawsuits filed by parents and political action by parents over the years. Be sure to thank those willing to fight the school system for their kid’s rights.

               https://edeq.stanford.edu/s…

               Disability

               Pennsylvania Association of Retarded Children v. Commonwealth (1971)

               Prior to this case, a Pennsylvania law allowed public schools to deny admission to students with cognitive disabilities. The district court hearing the case found the law unconstitutional and required that the state ensure the right to free education for children with disabilities at an appropriate level for the individual child.

               Mills v. Board of Education of District of Columbia (1972)

               Shortly after the PARC v. Commonwealth decision, several children challenged the District of Columbia public schools in court for both expelling and refusing admission to disabled students. The schools argued that they did not have the funding or resources to provide an education to disabled children. The district court found the practice in violation of the Equal Protection Clause and ordered the school board to provide equal access to education for disabled students.

               Smith v. Robinson (1984)

               The parents of a boy with cerebral palsy brought suit against his school district for transferring him to a school with inadequate resources. Before bringing the case to court, the parents had gone through the administrative process detailed in the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHA). The Supreme Court determined that since the EHA was designed to be comprehensive, disabled students and their families must rely only on the EHA in making such claims against schools.

               When I was unable to attend high school in the early 1970’s because of serve asthma the only thing the school system did was send a tutor by every couple weeks to drop off lessons for me to do on my own. The lessons were basically jokes, that only took an hour to so to do. Fortunately, I had access to first class libraries on science, history, and technology and so was able to teach myself (my brother collected books). Indeed, I challenged my way out of the freshman college courses when my asthma was brought under control and I was able to attend college, being admitted to New Mexico Tech on the basis of my ACT Score. I also saw what my daughters were learning, and not learning, in school and set up a program for them. Both breezed through college and have good careers now.

            4. In economics a monopoly is usually defined as controlling more than 90 percent of the market. I expect the number of charter schools and home schooled kids are far lower than that number.

4. You know the Tea Party sees that and says “see you don’t need all that money to get a good education.”

   1. The best education is a log with a student at one end and a real treacher at the other. Sadly the more our education system is industrialized the less education is taking place.

      1. Well, many so-called Conservatives want to privatize it, which will make it more of a nightmare.

         1. Not if it creates a competitive environment. But even privatized education runs into the problem of government standards on what is learned. A hundred years ago public education was competitive in that each community established its own standards with its local school board. But that power has mostly been taken over by Washington and it’s standardized tests.

            1. I am confused, Dr. M. Further above you state that the states have a near-monopoly on K-12 education but here you indicate that the Federal govt holds ‘the power’. Which is it?

            2. The states run the schools, but now they also have to meet federal testing standards (the most current version. No Students Left Behind, 2002).

               The old AT&T before the breakup might be a good example. They controlled 95% of the phone market when they built their network in the 1920′ and 1930’s, but the FCC then put regulations on them they had to satisfy to keep their monopoly on the phone system.

            3. The Feds contribute an average of 10% to local schools. This paltry amount is the leverage.

      2. A blackboard really helps. But I suppose a stick and scratching out figures in the dirt would due. I agree the quality of the teacher is the critical part. And I do worry about the tendency to use technology to make the material more appealing. I’m afraid the fancy graphics and multi-media presentations can add flash at the expense of content.

5. Paud Spudis writes, “The new budget also proposes to eliminate NASA’s Office of Education and move that money to exploration efforts. Though widely criticized, I think this is actually a good move. NASA has spent untold millions for “education” over the years, although these efforts have not resulted in any noticeable increase in public support for space.” from
   http://www.spudislunarresou…

   I found this statement quite sad because there are situations where education results are difficult to measure. Maybe it is the attitude is missing. 60 years ago when Sputnik was launched, the Natl Defense Education Act was enacted along with the Space Act.

   1. Paul Spudis seems to think that NASA education programs are supposed to be PR vehicles to generate public support. No. They are educational programs designed to educate. There is a vast difference.

      1. Yes. Thank you. Contributions to STEM education advance US global competitiveness and support the NASA mission as a workforce development effort. We all win when a kid gets turned on to science or engineering through NASA’s education outreach, especially when that kid dreams of working for NASA when he/she grows up,

         51 USC 20102 Congressional declaration of policy and purpose…
         (d)(5) The preservation of the role of the United States as a leader in aeronautical and space science and technology and in the application thereof to the conduct of peaceful activities within and outside the atmosphere.

      2. I suspect the stupidity of Spudis’ remark is a fairly accurate restatement of NASA’s own management’s position. Why are so many educated (and experienced) people as stupid as they appear to be?

         Is turnaround fair play? Spudis is a scientist, a geologist, and a proponent of human lunar science. I think there is a large contingent of geologists involved in pointing cameras and writing the captions on pictures taken from manned spacecraft. Are these efforts, which seem to mainly be for PR purposes, worth the PR value? Beyond that there is a large ISS science office, dozens of people, which seems mainly to do PR and not science. Are the dollars being spent worth the PR value?

      3. Last time I checked, there were dozens of NASA PR people with a budget well into the hundreds of millions of $$. NASA has essentially choked the life out of its education office since Bolden became Administrator. Contrary to Spudis’ opinion, apparently someone at NASA feels the money spent on PR is worthwhile. I wonder what effects their PR efforts have actually had? I also thought it ironic that Bolden, who ostensibly felt he would be a good Administrator at the outset, because his parents were science educators, was most supportive of terminating NASAs education functions. I wonder if Charlie feels that what his parents did to support and educate him was simply a waste?

6. I m a former teacher and presently a downtown NASM docent who interacts with students and general public. I believe it would be a serious blunder for the administration to cancel the NASA Ed office. I go there weekly to obtain key posters and materials for visiting teachers and kids on my tours. Nothing can be better for NASA than to outreach space information.
   School curriculums DO NOT detail or even mention space matters generally. So the teacher probably does not expand on US space achievements or future goals unless he has a special interest. Assuming that the kids are getting space info via the internet only is also a fallacy. I will say that some international groups on my tours have a greater grasp of space than US counterparts from my view. Why would the administration want to reject an important arm of NASA? Many educators have said the only thing more expensive than education is ignorance.

   1. Unlike when in the 1960s and 70s when every classroom had NASA Facts lining the walls, every library had dozens of NASA Educational Publications and every science and substitute teacher was showing 30 minute NASA films at least a couple times a month, none of these things are available for teachers and classrooms any longer, especially not for the big spenders in human space flight. NASA had whole series of curriculum guides that are no longer available. For the relatively minuscule money NASA has been spending on education, these were the kinds of things they should have been producing. Like much of The rest of NASA it has become a big bureaucracy that produces little of value any longer. Then if you examine the people they had in charge of these areas you’d find few experienced educators; few people who would know what is needed.

      1. I grew up in the period you mentioned (mostly) and owe my love of space and NASA to those very resources. This excitement motivated me to take in school advanced math (calc, diff equations, etc) as well as advanced science courses, all outside my major.

         I learned that I’m not a scientist- I love science, but my brain functions in a different way. Nonetheless, I appreciate the fact that I did learn about subjects not touched by colleagues.

         1. I suspect that in those bygone days the expensive part was printing and mailing, and yet they were able to reach millions. For those of us real fanatics, we were addicted to reading, watching and collecting. Now that distribution costs could be minimal, they distribute little of educational value. Now NASA mainly produces YouTube videos. Those that go viral reach tens of thousand though the stats show most people will watch less than a minute of the typical 7 to 10 minute video, and its virtually impossible to find definitive information on a lot of the BIG subjects, like ISS or Orion which tells how poor NASA’s publication management process is.

            1. A point well-made, and which reminds me of a conclusion I’ve been reaching, rightly or not: that there’s a bit of an empirical ‘war’ going on. Will we stay wed to serially delivering data, bit by bit, swayed by the apparent ease? Or will it be via a full-color spread, where the eye can dart here and there, putting together the Big Picture?

               Examples: For my writing projects, I use a software package called Scrivener. This is a stunningly great package designed by writers, for writers. My current project — a reference work on tropical plant material — is *much* easier with this bespoke tool, largely because the book is composed of tens of thousands of data points.

               Answer? An ‘analog’ tool — a big 4’x6′ blackboard!

               I like it because of what it can show me at a glimpse, something I can’t get on even a 29″ monitor. Scrivener provides a “corkboard” view but it’s not completely adequate.

               Using these tools I have my foot in the past, and the future. And the point I was trying to make is that YouTube and the like are simply incomplete.

               Perhaps audiobooks vs. printed books are another example. I listen to a lot of audiobooks. Because they are serial data it’s difficult to go back, looking for a particular character or reference without a bookmark.

               /end of a too-long ramble.

7. I believe from what I have seen, it is the poorly named “Operations and Exploration” organization, which like with Technology, is pirating the relatively minuscule Education funds. Funny thing is Ops and Exploration is doing little of either; they are wasting huge amounts on Ops to train and support fewer than a handful of astronauts each year and a single vehicle with no launches, and they have done no Exploration in decades. They waste tremendous numbers of dollars and we get nothing for them. As far as Spudis’s comment that NASA does not get enough PR value from the education dollars, that was not the intent of education, and NASA ‘Ops and Exploration’ is spending more money than ever on PR and yet like the rest of Ops and Exploration, we see little value from the dollars spent.

8. Something to think about:

   1. Last time I checked, the federal government has a Department of Education, with a budget of more than $60 billion, 3 times the total NASA budget.

   2. NIH has an Office of Science Education, Obama administration tried to eliminate it in 2013, I believe that effort was blocked by congress.

   So it seems to me the proposal to eliminate NASA Education Office is not about federal government’s support of education, nor is it a partisan or Trump issue. It’s purely an internal NASA issue.

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