Students across the North America will celebrate the importance of mathematics, science and technology Thursday during the sixth annual Space Day celebration, an event aimed at inspiring today's children to become the explorers of tomorrow.
Entitled "Space Day 2003Celebrating The Future of Flight," the educational program will focus on this year's 100th anniversary on of flight, and the future of aviation and space travel, event coordinators said.
"I think this is very important, mostly because I think space is our future," said 18-year-old Canadian Anne Breaks, teen spokeswoman for the Space Day program.
Breaks told SPACE.com that she hopes to one day become an astronaut and that the Space Day program was created to help children realize that working in space science is a career like any other.
Tomorrow's program includes an opening ceremony at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, a Cyber Space Day webcast and more than 200 other events across the United States for student groups ranging in size from 1,000 children to individual classrooms.
Space Day officials will announce the winners of this year's Space Day design challenge, a competition for students between grades 4 through 8 to build aircraft models, flyable model spacecraft and other scale-model vehicles that use renewable energy sources to stay airborne.
Students will also have the opportunity to send their signatures in space y signing posters that will be digitized, then sent up aboard one of NASA's space shuttles. Classrooms will then receive their signed posters back next Space Day, along with a picture of the shuttle crew that carried their signatures into space.
"I think it's really important to try and take some of the mystery out of science and put back some of the fun," said NASA researcher Anna-Maria Rivas McGowan, a national Space Day spokeswoman, during a telephone interview. McGowan is program manager for NASA's morphing project at Langley Research Center aimed at developing future air vehicle technology. "It's all about awareness, and the great part of Space Day is that it's accessible through the Internet to just about everybody, young and old."
Space Day began in 1997 to promote the advancement of science, mathematics, engineering and technology in the minds of students. Each year, more than 75 educational, non-profit, commercial and government groups serve as Space Day partners, organizing local space-related events in communities across North America.
SPACE.com's parent company Space Holdings, Inc. is a Space Day partner.
"The aviation and space exploration pioneers of this last century look to our youth take the next steps in humankind's celestial journeys," said Senator John Glenn, Space Day co-chairman and the first U.S. astronaut to orbit the Earth, in a written statement. "These students, who represent our future space pioneers, will one day realize exciting possibilities that we can only now imagine."
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