Long-distance call: Students at Hopewell school fire questions at astronaut on space station

HOPEWELL — Sixth-grader Dominic Light thought he was asking a simple question and hoping to get a simple answer.

"How many miles does the [International Space Station] travel in a day?" Dominic asked Dr. Thomas Marshburn, one of the seven members of the international crew aboard the station.

Marshburn, a medical doctor, decided to turn the tables on the youngster.

"Dominic, I'm going to ask you and your classmates to calculate that," the astronaut replied. "You need to get the radius of the Earth plus 250 miles, and the ISS travels 16 orbits in a day. So with that information, I think you'd be able to calculate it out."

Dominic rolled his eyes, waved his arms a bit and returned to his seat. His fellow students at Carter G. Woodson Middle School giggled and groaned along with him.

"I thought he was joking," Dominic said after the session was over.

Ten sixth-graders from Woodson fired off 20 questions at Marshburn as the ISS flew 250 miles in space above them. They communicated through a combination of amateur radio and telephone lines for 10 minutes while the space station was in signal range. That meant both questions and answers had to be quick, and had to end with the word, "over."

Their teacher, Alexandra Perry, made sure the kids were prepped and ready to go.

"We've been practicing for about a month every week," Perry, a second-year teacher said. "Once a week, we would practice-run through it a couple of times. Students had cards with them up there, and they were exactly what to say, including their names and 'over.' They did an amazing job."

Woodson Middle was one of 10 schools nationwide scheduled to talk to the ISS on Monday.

A lot of front-end work

Monday's 10-minute visit was actually more than one year in the making.

NASA has a program in place called Amateur Radio on the International Space Station where schoolchildren are able to speak with astronauts in the midst of ISS missions. Perry submitted Woodson's proposal to talk to the astronauts in January 2021 and found out her proposal was accepted two months later.

With the assistance of the Richmond Amateur Radio Club, Perry and the Woodson staff started to make things happen.

Students were taught how to communicate through ham radio and learned all of the necessary lingo. RARC members came to the school and explained how the process works, and were even able to recruit a few future members in the process.

Watch the livestream of the Carter G. Woodson Middle School talk with the International Space Station below.

It definitely was a whole new learning world for the kids selected, one that Perry said she felt they initially had a hard time grasping.

"I think t first they didn't understand exactly what it was until we started talking about it more, like when we started learning about what life is like in space and zero gravity, and how much it changes your body and I would say changes the way you have to live," Perry said. "And once we dove a little bit more into the radio and the guys started coming in and doing hands-on activities with us, that is when they started grasping actually was going to start happening."

The day of the chat

Woodson's multi-purpose room looked like space-command central Monday morning. Monitors and screens surrounded the room, all showing different videos and images. On one of them, the ISS was being tracked.

As the kids began filing into the room, the ISS was over Australia. That was about 9 a.m. Since the station flies at more than 18,000 mph, that meant show time was set to begin at 9:43 a.m.

And it did. Right on the dot.

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"Read you loud and clear. Ready for the first question," the moderator said.

The questions the kids asked ran the gamut, from how much food and water they have on the ISS, to if there were any animals on the station and how an crew member's day usually plays out.

Then there were some more direct ones.

"What made you decide to want to live in space?" sixth-grader Emani Turner asked Marshburn.

"I was always fascinated with science and technology," Marshburn, a medical doctor from Statesville, North Carolina, said. "I had a sense of adventure, I was very curious and I wanted to see what the Earth looked like from space and how it would be to live in zero-g."

When they are not working, Marshburn told the kids they live to eat, look out the window, take pictures and talk with each other. When the satellites are arranged just right, he said the crew can speak with their families on Earth.

Jahlil Williams asked about the effects of the return to Earth after so long in space.

"Our bones and our muscles may be a little weak [from zero-gravity]," Marshburn said. Especially weak, he added, is the system that keeps people upright — with so much floating around, their feet rarely touch the floor of the station.

"Sometimes we have trouble standing up and walking," he said, "and turning corners."

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In response to how the moon looks from space, Marshburn said, it looks very much like you would see it from Earth on a clear night.

"The color is a little different," he said. "It looks like it's a real color which is ash gray and not quite as bright as on the Earth."

Piqued interests

Once the session was completed and the ISS was again out of range, the kids back at Woodson felt almost as high in the sky as the people with whom they spoke.

Emani said she thought it was cool talking to someone up in space "because you're normally used to communicating with somebody near you or somebody that you know far away, but talking to somebody that's not on you're planet is kind of crazy."

Serenity Westcott, who asked about having animals in space, said she thought it would be interesting to live up there with animals. She said the conversation made her really want to go to space now.

"I used to always like space when I was younger," Serenity said. "I would like it if I could take some of that stuff and teach my younger sister about it.

By the way, about the answer to the question about how many miles the ISS travels in a day: The radius of the Earth is roughly 3,960 miles, add 250 to make that 4,210 miles. In a 24-hour period, the station makes 16 orbits.

The grand total is about 67,360 miles each day. To put that in greater perspective, that translates to about 23 one-direction trips across the U.S. every day.

Bill Atkinson (he/him/his) is daily news coach for USA TODAY's Southeast Region-Unified Central, which includes Virginia, West Virginia and central North Carolina. He is based in Petersburg, Virginia. Reach him at batkinson@progress-index.com.

This article originally appeared on The Progress-Index: Hopewell students chat with astronaut aboard space station Monday