Historic Opportunity for your School District or Community College to fly a real grade 5-14 student experiment aboard final US Space Shuttle Flight – the Flight of Atlantis – resulting from an experiment design competition in your community!

The National Center for Earth and Space Science Education (NCESSE; http://ncesse.org) announces a truly remarkable opportunity for a school district or community college on the final flight of Space Shuttle Atlantis (STS-135) - which is the historic final flight of the U.S. Space Shuttle program.

This is an opportunity for your community to be part of a high visibility, high caliber, U.S. national STEM education program.

We are now inviting school districts and community colleges across the U.S. to be part of the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP). SSEP was designed as a keystone national STEM education initiative to help engage and inspire America's next generation of scientists and engineers through immersion in real science. We believe that "student as scientist" represents the very best in science education.

Each participating school district or community college will be provided an experiment slot in a real microgravity research mini-laboratory flying on Space Shuttle Atlantis. Our Center will then guide you through an experiment design competition, which you can open up to as many as 3,200 students. Or you could opt for participation by a single middle or high school. Your student teams then design real experiments vying for your reserved slot on this historic flight, with designs constrained by mini-laboratory operation and the need to pass a real NASA Flight Safety Review.

Additional SSEP programming leverages the flight experiment design competition to engage your entire community - students, teachers, families and the public - embracing a Learning Community Model for STEM education.

As a benchmark, for the final flight of Shuttle Endeavour (STS-134) 16 communities came aboard, offering 20,000 students the ability to participate. 447 proposals from student teams were submitted and the 16 experiments chosen for flight are now going through NASA Flight Safety Review.

Consider SSEP for your school district or community college. Our goal for Atlantis is 50 communities and 100,000 students participating.

Note that SSEP is the first pre-college national STEM education program that is implemented as an on-orbit commercial space venture. While the Center is a non-profit, SSEP is associated with real cost that is passed on to the participating community. That said, we understand the tough economic times, and can help you find underwriters. We successfully identified funding for 11 of the 16 communities participating in SSEP for Space Shuttle Endeavour.

If interested, visit the SSEP website (link below) for a full description of the program, and links to profiles of communities currently participating, and descriptions of the experiments selected for flight on Shuttle Endeavour.

Be part of history. Come aboard Atlantis for a journey that your students and teachers will never forget.

for video clip on SSEP Program.

for main SSEP Website.

And if you'd like, you can call me or email me directly:

Best wishes,

Dr. Jeff Goldstein, Center Director

National Center for Earth and Space Science Education