HOUSTON - Space
tourist-in-training Richard Garriott hopes to hold class in orbit when he reaches
the International Space Station (ISS) this fall.
Garriott,
46, is planning a series of interactive webcasts and other activities with U.S.
students in conjunction with the Challenger Center for Space Science Education
to spark interest in human spaceflight and science.
Hailing
from Austin, Texas, Garriott is an American
computer game developer and the son of retired NASA astronaut Owen
Garriott. He is paying about $30 million for the chance to launch toward the
ISS aboard a Russian rocket in October and will be the first second-generation
U.S. spaceflyer once he reaches orbit.
"I'm a big
believer in education being the key to the future for all of us here on planet
Earth," Garriott told SPACE.com in a recent interview. "And I think in
particularly in our age, the interest or devotion to space science or science
in general is relatively lacking, so anything I can do to kind of help spur
that on is time well spent."
The "Garriott
Science Challenge," a cooperative effort between the space tourist and the
Arlington, Va.-based Challenger Center, a 50-center education group founded by
the families of the astronauts lost during NASA's 1986 Challenger accident. Garriott
and center officials announced the joint endeavor during a Tuesday event here
at the Houston Museum of Natural Science's Challenger Learning Center.
"Like
father, like son," said June Scobee Rodgers, widow of Challenger's 51-L mission
commander Dick Scobee and the Challenger Center's founding chairman, in a
statement. "Dr. Owen Garriott also taught student science lessons from space on
his Skylab mission, as Richard plans to do on his flight."
Garriott's father Owen flew on the third expedition to the U.S.
Skylab space station in 1973 before later flying on a NASA shuttle.
The younger
Garriott will ride a Russian-built Soyuz rocket to the ISS on a planned
nine-day orbital flight under an agreement brokered with Russia's Federal Space
Agency by the Virginia-based tourism firm Space Adventures. His is the sixth
paying visitor to the ISS and plans to conduct protein crystal experiments and recreate
his father's Earth Skylab Earth observation photographs to demonstrate how the
planet has changed after more than three decades.
Student
outreach
For the
Garriott Science Challenge, the space tourist is planning a series of
mission-related podcasts and interactive webcasts to discuss his spaceflight.
He is also drawing up flight experiments that can be replicated by students on
Earth, such as using everyday objects to demonstrate fundamental concepts in
physics. The sessions are expected to be available in digital format at the
Challenger Center Web site, center officials said.
Once in
space, Garriott has said he hopes to speak with students via ham radio
sessions. The effort is aimed at continuing the educational outreach begun by NASA
astronaut Barbara Morgan, a former Idaho schoolteacher who flew to the ISS
in August 2007 during NASA's STS-118 mission, center officials said. Morgan
also served as the backup for Teacher-in-Space Christa McAuliffe, who was a
member of Challenger's seven-astronaut crew during its ill-fated 1986 launch.
The
Challenger Center effort is the latest education-themed announcement concerning
Garriott's upcoming spaceflight. Earlier this year, he launched
the "Space Challenge!" in the United Kingdom, which calls on students to contemplate
the nature of private spaceflight and design experiments Garriott could perform
in space.
"So we've
just announced the first step in my fairly broad educational agenda which was
this space challenge for students to be able to actually help propose
experiments that I can perform directly in space," Garriott said in an
interview.
Garriott recently
returned to the U.S. after a six-week
training session at Russia's Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City.
He is slated to launch toward the ISS with two professional astronauts on Oct.
12 and return to Earth with two Russian cosmonauts, including Sergei Volkov –
the first second-generation cosmonaut to fly in space.
Volkov,
commander of the space station's Expedition 17 mission, is scheduled to launch
on April 8 with flight engineer Oleg Kononenko and Yi So-Yeon, South Korea's
first astronaut.
Click here
to learn more about the Garriott Science Challenge from the Challenger Center
for Space Science Education.
Richard
Garriott is chronicling his spaceflight training and orbital mission at his
personal Web site: http://www.richardinspace.com.
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