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BRUNSWICK– Brunswick Junior High School students will notice a tragic change when they log on to their Web site this week.
Normally this site stands as an information hub and a place for students to explore. But since Saturday, the site has served as a memorial to send out praise to the astronauts of the Columbia space shuttle tragedy and condolences to their families.
In this small southern Maine school, close ties to the NASA program have had profound effects on the community.
Diane Bowen, an eighth-grade science teacher at the school, led a team of students in a program called EarthKam. Over the past few weeks, the students followed the crew of STS-107 closely, learning from and listening to them. As recently as Thursday, the students watched live footage of the astronauts answering questions.
In an interview with the Portland Press Herald, Bowen stated that all of her students, not just the EarthKam team, were taking the tragedy relatively hard.
“They have been inundated with reports in every single class, presentations on exactly what’s going on on Columbia, and so this is going to hit all of them, not just my EarthKam team,” she said.
Bowen has worked with NASA-sponsored programs in her classroom for years and was even sent applications for the teacher-in-space program expected to start again soon. Despite this tragedy, Bowen insists the space program should continue.
“It’s what they would have wanted,” she said.
Bowen’s mentality is mirrored by a quotation from astronaut Gus Grissom, that stands at the bottom of the Web site memorial: “If we die, we want people to accept it. We’re in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.”
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