WARNER ROBINS -- Sitting at the Apollo 13 flight director’s chair was a dream come true for one Houston County High School student.
A bigger thrill for senior Erika Leslie was seeing the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, a large pool 40 feet deep where astronauts train for zero gravity. She remembered seeing pictures of the pool and always wanted to see it in person.
Leslie missed her first week of school this year to attend NASA’s Women in STEM High School Aerospace Scholars program at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. STEM stands for science, technology, engineering and math.
“I was technically a dropout,” Leslie joked.
The fiery redhead is a science nut. In her junior year she took Joe Molyson’s astronomy class. She was already taking three science classes and thought, “Why not add on a fourth?”
It was in this class she learned about the NASA program and applied. This is the first year the program was offered nationwide.
“I was on cloud nine when she told me,” Molyson said. His class, which has 135 students, is one of the largest astronomy programs in Georgia.
Leslie and her team of 39 other young women spent their time building robots, creating budgets and organizing a trip to Mars. They were supported by other women at NASA.
One of the concepts was to put astronauts in chronic sleep.
“What we were planning was so many years in the future,” Leslie said.
Some of the research they did has already been done at NASA, but the program encourages young women to get involved in science and in math.
Leslie took seven weeks of an intensive math class in the spring just to be able to qualify for the program.
Now that she’s taken the course, it falls to her to try to recruit some of her fellow classmates to apply for the program.
With the help of Molyson, she will have a briefing session with interested students to tell them about her experience working with NASA.
The week she spent at NASA has given Leslie new insight on what it takes to live in space.
Leslie’s research has given her the knowledge to talk about muscle atrophy in space, nutrition and the international space station. “If we learn to live on the moon, we could live on Mars,” she said.
