Heather Inslee has been fascinated with space since third grade and has a goal of working for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. She doesn’t plan to be tied to the ground — she wants to “explore a different world” as an astronaut.
A junior at Pratt High when school begins next month, she has an idea what that life will be like, having completed four levels of the Future Astronaut Training Program developed by the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center. She has worked with team members to build robots that perform various tasks, built and launched rockets and participated in simulated space flights. She has seen what goes on behind the scenes of space launches.
The first two camps were held at the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson. Level 3 included two days at Johnson Space Center in Houston, where campers met with astronauts, attended a briefing when they returned from a mission and toured Apollo Mission Control.
In June, Inslee graduated from Level 4, at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Campers worked in teams to build a payload for a weather balloon, which they then launched and tracked. She was assigned to the stability team, where “minimizing the swing” turned out to be harder than expected.
Two college professors served as guides, while the campers used computers as a research tool to design the project and solve problems.
“It’s a lot of thinking, doing, trial and error,” Inslee commented. She’s comfortable with that type of process, likes a hands-on method of learning.
Already she is looking forward to a final camp next year, Future Astronaut Training Extreme, where she will “fly” two or three missions, get her SCUBA certification at a NASA facility in Arkansas and log some flying time in a Cessna plane. After that, she hopes for a summer job as a counselor for the space camp program.
The daughter of Nancy and Darrel Brant of rural Isabel, Inslee plans to attend Wichita State or Kansas State University for a degree in aerospace engineering before beginning what she realizes will be a lot of training before she gets to experience real space travel.
She has balanced a high school schedule that includes a lot of math and science with softball, band, serving as manager for the wrestling team, and membership in the Pep Club and KAY Club.
