Last year Dr. Justin Yates, assistant professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, was presented the opportunity to build a team of students to partner with Residents in Space and the United States Rocket Academy in designing and building a device that would carry experiments into space – at a very low cost. Under guidance from the Space Engineering Research Center, part of the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES), the team was tasked to develop a new research platform, the Lynx Cub Payload Carrier (LCPC), with the intent to dramatically reduce space flight costs for small science and education payloads.
Texas A&M faculty, Yates and Tom Talley; students Austin Goswick, Eric Chao, Donald Boyd, and Cress Netherland; and TEES researchers Chip Hill and Frank Little designed and fabricated the LCPC. The first one was delivered recently and will fly on the XCOR Lynx spacecraft. XCOR Aerospace is an American private rocket engine and spaceflight development company.
Into this picture enters Steve Heck of Cincinnati, a retired Air Force officer, middle school teacher, and now a member of the Teachers in Space program. As a “Pathfinder” for the Teachers in Space program, Heck will be part of a select group of teachers who will be educated in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM); trained for space flight and launched for a sub-orbital flight. Unlike NASA’s teacher-astronaut program, where the teachers become part of the NASA astronaut corps, the Teachers in Space program puts these astronauts back in the classroom. Heck will take his extraordinary experiences and return to his Milford Junior High classroom to share his stories, knowledge and passion with his students.
Heck is also very excited about the Lynx Cub Carrier and its K-12 capabilities. So much so that he has developed and is testing a K-12 program to fly (suborbital) 10 student-designed experiments on the Lynx. In fact his school district is the first in the nation to establish a contract with a commercial aerospace company, XCOR.
Currently, Heck has over 580 students working in 137 design teams and hoping to have their experiment selected as one of the 10 winners. Heck also has plans to take the program nationally. So, Yates’ own personal interest in space convinced him to get a student engineering team involved with the LCPC. The result of that effort is now giving Heck a way to have his students experience scientific research in a way not previously possible. While the Texas A&M/TEES team of faculty, researchers, and students knew developing the LCPC was an idea that would benefit, they did not anticipate this level of impact.
— Additional content for this article was obtained from the Milford School District’s website.