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Astronaut speaks to students
Astronaut Dr. Bonnie Dunbar, who has flown on five Shuttle missions and coordinates many of the shuttle science experiments, visited Mountain Home last week, talking to students and keynoting the annual Air Force Association banquet on base.
It was a busy trip for the wo-man who has traveled around the world literally hundreds of times.
During her day-long visit to Mountain Home last Wednesday Dunbar met with students at the Airman's Leadership School on base, then spoke to more than 1300 students at the high school, junior high and base schools.
A high school cheerleader from the small town of Sunnyvale, Wash., Dunbar was a top student in science and math at her small school. "We had the same 22 people in grades 1-8," she said, and the high school she attended in the next town wasn't much bigger.
She went on to earn degrees in materials engineering and began working with NASA contractors building such items as the Space Shuttle Columbia. Later, she moved on to NASA itself as an engineer and, in the late 1980s, was selected for the astronaut program. She has been a mission specialist on five missions totalling 50 days in space.
She stressed to students the virtues of a strong education in the sciences, and noted that "no one should ever end their education. It's a lifelong process."
She urged students to seek a vision in their life "and then go out and do it."
Many students asked her about the recent Columbia tragedy. She said investigators were now focusing on damage to the leading edge of the wing as the probable cause of the disaster.
But she also told the students that "we go into this business to push the leading edge, knowing there is an element of risk. It's worth the risk. I'm more concerned about friends who lose their lives in senseless auto accidents" than in those who die pushing the frontiers of science.
"It is important that we not stop," she said, pointing out that "when we first started to fly (airplanes) the mortality rate was very high." Airmail carriers, for example, lost about 20 percent of their number in air accidents in the early years of flying.
But over and over again, she stressed the need to continue manned exploration of space. "If the American people don't want to explore space, it will go away," she said. "I work for the American people."
But the benefits of space exploration are enormous, she pointed out, from the technology developed to improvements in medicine and earth sciences work that can improve the environment. Recent developments to develop self-contained environments on spacecraft, for example, have resulted in creating small water purification systems that can solve problems for people across the planet.
She also pointed out that the United States has no monopoly on space. "The Wright brothers were the first to fly, but we're not the only nation flying airplanes these days," she told a group of selected science students who met with her after her assembly presentation at the high school. Russia continues to launch men (and women) into space, Europe is preparing a manned space program, India has announced it is beginning a manned space program, and the Chinese, who may launch their first astronaut next year, have declared plans to put a man back on the moon.
The world is going to see rapid growth in the exploration and exploitation of space, she said, "and we want to be part of it."
"China and India recognized the benefits for their nations" in terms of science, technology and R&D "that then goes back out into the economy."
Dunbar also pointed out that space exploration is actually fairly cheap, with NASA taking only a tiny fraction of the federal budget. "We spend more on pizza in this country than we spend on the space program," she noted, munching on a pizza with the 20 selected high school students who got some "one-on-one" time with her.
She said in a recent talk with John Young, one of 12 Americans to walk on the moon, that he stressed the need to move mankind "incrementally" into space. "It's not any more impossible than someone sitting on the coast of Spain trying to convince Isabella to send ships off the edge of the earth," she said, and the rewards are likely to be even greater.
That evening, she brought out her "home movies" of some of her trips in space while speaking to the 100 people who filled the Gunfighter Club for the annual banquet of the Snake River Chapter of the Air Force Association, headed locally by Col. (ret.) Don Walbrecht, a former SR-71 pilot, and Gunfighter Flight No. 93 of the Order of the Deadeleans. She urged AFA members to support the space program, noting it was one of the smallest discretionary budgets in the entire spectrum of federal spending, but its returns to the American people have been enormous.
She also issued a warning for the future. "Technology takes people," she said, and today, foreign countries are producing far more engineers and scientists than the United States is. Many of them are trained in the United States. Only half of all the PhD's graduating from U.S. colleges are U.S. citizens. China is producing three times as many engineers as the United States.
But beyond the return on investment that the space program provides, there is the grander vision of space exploration, of seeking the unknown and overcoming the obstacles to working in the most hostile of all environments.
NASA officials, such as herself, "must constantly justify ourselves to Congress because they don't see that vision. They've lost the big picture. But when I go out to the American people, they see that grand vision."
Work in space is changing life on earth, she said, but whether or not America continues to lead the world in space exploration, or see the torch passed to some other nation, is up to the American people and Congress.