At Space Day, Leery Dreams of Stardom

Humans will build a highway to space, colonies will thrive on the moon and Mars, and space travel will be as routine as the average family vacation.

Students taking part in Space Day yesterday at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles International Airport made those predictions, as generations of children have before them. Yet many of the children who crowded around the displays amid the center's massive airplanes said they weren't so sure that space was the place for them.

"It's too scary. There are too many risks," said Elyse Grossberg, 11, a student at Crossfield Elementary School in Herndon, sounding a note of caution repeated by some students at the center, an annex of the National Air and Space Museum.

Two years after the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated in the sky over Texas, killing all seven astronauts aboard, NASA is preparing to return a shuttle to flight. But for many of the 1,500 students who participated in Space Day, the tragedy has lingered, one more national calamity in a string of calamities that have marked their lives so far.

"You think [space] could be really cool, but then sad things can happen," Nanda Ramcoobair, 12, who attends Lime Kiln Middle School in Fulton, in Howard County.

"It's like 9/11. People thought flying was the safest way to travel until that happened," added classmate Liz Thompson, 12.

At a morning presentation, NASA Deputy Administrator Frederick D. Gregory, the president of sponsor Lockheed Martin Corp., the crew of a future shuttle mission and space legend John Glenn all worked to persuade students to stay in school, study science and consider a career in the space industry.

"Whether you become astronauts, scientists, engineers or part of the whole support network, you'll all be needed," said Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth, who returned to space on the shuttle in 1998.

In an interview afterward, Glenn said that the possibilities for students have expanded enormously since he was young, when the idea of getting into space was unbelievable.

"They've seen space travel all their lives. They've never known a time when they doubted that we can do these things," he said. "So many more things have opened up for them."

Encouraged by the presentation -- the astronauts stuck around to sign autographs -- many students dared to dream. Crossfield student Zak Rice, 12, said future astronauts will go to space on "big, twin-engine, V-8 space shuttles." Rosalie Fischer, 11, who attends Eastern Middle School in Silver Spring, predicted that it would be no more than 20 years before a human walks on Mars.

The space shuttle, familiar now as the iconic image of exploration, is set to fly again this summer. President Bush has promised to finish construction of the International Space Station and restart manned missions to the moon by 2020.

But Lime Kiln science teacher Francis Baranson said he wonders whether some of the astonishment he felt as a child watching rocket launches on blurry black-and-white televisions in the 1960s hasn't been lost for his students, who have grown up with the Internet and movies full of dazzling special effects.

"The kind of technology they take for granted, we just didn't conceive of when I was a young man," he said. "Take the launch of shuttle. It's magic for me. It's the most complicated piece of machinery we've built as humans. But for them, it's ho-hum."

The Columbia accident has been a reminder for children that space is still dangerous and that astronauts are still brave, said Nancy Stevens, a teacher at Harmony Intermediate School in Hamilton.

"They are a little blase about the whole space program. They hear more media hype for athletic events and movie openings," she said, adding that the Columbia disaster "takes you back to the beginning."

Her students, who won a national Space Day competition and were honored at a ceremony at NASA headquarters in Washington on Wednesday night, agreed that their parents were more captivated by space travel than they are.

"All the firsts have been done. We're just repeating," said Mary Fore, 13.

"Until we go to Mars," said Harmony classmate Natalie DeHart, 13. "That will be cool."