Ready for liftoff

Space has always been its own inspiration, a place of recent vast adventure and hero-making flights. Glenn, Shepard and Armstrong fired the dreams of a generation of children who hoped that someday they too might blast away from earth, float free from the bother of gravity, perhaps leave a footprint on the moon. NASA’s flight’s these days are a good deal more prosaic – long stays in the International Space Station seem to be the dominant theme – but the heavens still inspire and instruct.

That is the same goal as the Challenger Learning Center, a nonprofit with 40 sites around the nation and one scheduled for Bangor for next year, if the fund raising works. A committee of the Bangor City Council last week was right to encourage the development of a center here. Its recommendation to donate a building and throw in $250,000 besides represents an excellent response to this promising project.

Aimed at students in fifth through eighth grades, the space centers conduct simulated space flights, depending on student teams at mission control and aboard a space station. The process, which can start weeks or months earlier with classroom work, emphasizes practical applications for math and science, teaches decision-making and team-building skills and, if the mission goes as expected, raises aspirations of students to think more broadly of what they would like to do with their lives.

One of the several benefits of this project is that its Bangor organizers are not guessing at its usefulness. The Challenger Center for Space Science Education, based in Alexandria, Va., was founded in 1986 by family members of the crew who died in the Challenger tragedy and who wanted to see something positive grow from this disaster. There are 40 centers currently operating (none have failed) and ample experience from the national group to help Bangor’s succeed as well. Centers elsewhere draw an average of 10,000 students a year, including students who attend schools two hours or more away. A center in Bangor would be ideally situated to draw students from all over Maine.

Before this project is ready for the launch pad, however, it needs funds. The City Council should support the committee’s recommendation for the building – the old Portland Hall, once a theater at Dow Air Force Base and now a major rehab candidate – but the generous offer of $250,000 is only enough to get started.

Like the Maine Discovery Museum, which relied on some large donations and many small ones, the Challenger Learning Center will need strong, consistent public support. Members of the community already have come forward to volunteer their time for the project, but it will need more than that if it is to meet its scheduled opening next year. Like the nation’s space program, it will depend on the public’s support and its aspirations toward the stars.