AEA's Alabama Aerospace Liftoff Celebration arrives in Auburn

AEA’s three-day Alabama Aerospace Celebration got a tremendous liftoff when 4,200 excited students from the school systems in Chambers and Lee counties came together in Auburn University’s Beard-Eaves Coliseum for a special program featuring astronauts Jim Voss and Hank Hartsfield. Both Voss and Hartsfield are Alabama natives and Auburn University graduates. The three-day event included the student program, teacher workshops on Saturday, and a community celebration at Drake Middle School on Sunday afternoon.
Voss and Hartsfield shared a video with students filled with personal photographs taken on their space shuttle, Skylab, and International Space Center missions. They shared the same presentation during the teacher workshops on Saturday. Voss is a veteran of five space flights and during 2001 he lived and worked aboard the International Space Station as a member of the Expedition-2 crew. He has logged 201 days in space including four spacewalks totaling 22 hours and 35 minutes. Hartsfield was Alabama’s first astronaut.
Teachers attending Saturday’s workshops received ideas for developing and implementing an aerospace program across the curriculum and at all grade levels including rocketry, aviation science and aerodynamics, out of this world Web sites, astronaut training, and a robotics competition offered through Auburn University. The program ended with a panel discussion about the future of aerospace education including the prospective that space exploration will become more commercialized with more career opportunities not only for those who will actually go into space but for the many support functions that make space travel possible.

Pictured above is Alabama Aerospace Celebration Cadre Chair Cynda Fickert welcoming more than 4,200 students from the Auburn and Opelika area to the 2007 Aerospace Student Liftoft Program held at Beard-Eaves Coliseum at Auburn University on March 9, 2007.

Rules* for the contests held in conjunction with the Alabama Aerospace Celebration were sent to the coordinator for each school system. They may also be printed from the file linked to the word Rules in the previous sentence.

Look for the 2009 Aerospace Celebration!