Toys, science, space combine for fun time
That's what Kathy Sullivan told a group of preteens during her keynote address at the Sally Ride Science ToyChallenge competition at the Sigma Xi Center in Research Triangle Park on Saturday.
And Sullivan, the first woman to walk in space, knows firsthand what you can see from the porthole windows of a space shuttle.
In space, she told the crowd of scientifically inclined students, "You can see huge expanses of nations, full continents, right out your office windows."
Sullivan told the students that she became an astronaut out of curiosity, the same thing that landed them at the competition, where teams of fifth- to eighth-grade students from across the East Coast designed and presented toys that used scientific principles.
The competition is sponsored by Sally Ride Science, a company founded by the first woman astronaut Sally Ride to support girls' interest in science and math. Competition guidelines state that at least three members of each six-student team must be girls.
Teams presented toys with names like "Dino Soar" and "Grab that Jelly!" to a panel of judges in hopes of winning prizes like iPods or a trip to Space Camp.
Sullivan wowed the students, many of whom let out loud, inspired "oohs" and "ahhs" at the images of space the former astronaut presented in a slide show. One photo, which she said was taken with a handheld store-bought camera, captured every slope of Mount Everest.
In another, Sullivan, a geography enthusiast, described dangling from a rail of the exterior of the shuttle, watching the Caribbean Sea flow at four miles a minute between her space boots.
The lecture darted back and forth between poetry and comedy, as Sullivan described the Earth's atomosphere as "fuzz around a tennis ball," and the aurora borealis as "the beautiful consequence of molecules."
"It's quite a thing," she said, describing viewing the phenomenon from space, "flying between these thin diaphanous curtains of blue-green light.
At the end of her lecture, Sullivan showed the group a 1951 cartoon that looked strikingly like a photo of the space shuttle orbiting the earth she'd shown in an earlier slide.
The cartoon depicted a gray-toned orbiter and a space station hovering outside of the earth's atmosphere.
At the time the image was drawn, Sullivan said, most people thought it was just science fiction.
"And some people said, 'stupid,' others said it was baloney, but some people called it visionary, and some people said, 'I bet we could.'"