By Jeffrey Manber – NASA’s educational folks have taken note of the great job that Jeff Goldstein and everyone at SSEP has done in launching a national space STEM project via the NanoRacks’ flight and payload opportunities. You can read what they say on the NASA web site at: https://ssep.ncesse.org/2011/04/major-announcement-student-spaceflight-experiments-program-ssep-now-featured-at-www-nasa-gov/
And to better understand just how robust the program now is, involving the 16 school districts on STS-134 and I think it is 11 school districts on the final shuttle, STS-135, go visit their web site at https://ssep.ncesse.org/.
In thanks to NASA for highlighting the program, Jeff posted a note on his site under both our names, (he cleared it with me first!) Let me reprint it here. And add a thanks to everyone, at NASA, at the schools, in the community, that have helped launch this wonderful national space STEM effort via the commercial opportunities on U.S. National Lab.
From Jeff Goldstein:
The National Center for Earth and Space Science Education (NCESSE), and NanoRacks, LLC, are proud to pass on word from NASA that the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP) is now featured at the NASA.gov website. Besides the main article, there is a separate feature article—written by the communities themselves—for 13 of the 16 SSEP communities participating on the flight of STS-134.
We are honored that NASA has worked so long and hard to feature this program, and embraced so warmly what it is achieving for students, teachers, families, and communities across America. We are deeply honored that SSEP is part of these historic final two flights of the U.S. Space Shuttle Program. We are deeply honored to work with 27 dedicated communities—16 on STS-134 and 11 on STS-135—that have made this program their own.
And we are moved with the realization that some of the students touched by this program may one day enter the NASA workforce, and enter this nation’s rank of scientists and engineers, with the capacity of propelling human exploration to bold new frontiers.
We invite you to read about SSEP—the students, the teachers, the communities—in their own words.
To enter the feature article from the main NASA site, go to https://www.nasa.gov, and in the top navigation banner under the NASA logo, either click on “For Educators” or “For Students”. It is featured at both landing sites.
Dr. Jeff Goldstein, SSEP Program Director
Center Director, National Center for Earth and Space Science Education
Jeffrey Manber, Managing Director
NanoRacks, LLC