Close to 100 students from the Goderich Air Cadets and St. Marys School in Goderich were able to take part in a conversation with an astronaut in the International Space Station.
The event was organized by Captain Ryan McClinchey and held at the Columbus Centre in Goderich on Friday. McClinchey says the astronauts only do one or two of those a year and it took about two years to get everything worked out.
“They’ve been very interested and very active once we found out our date everyone booked the day off school,” McClinchey said. “It’s a Friday, you can see we have an excellent turnout, so they all got to take some time off class today and come here. But they probably learned just as much as they would have in school, I’m sure, today.”
The Space Station circles the Earth fifteen or sixteen time in 24 hours, so it’s travelling fairly quickly and they have to be right over the people they want to talk to on Earth. So the window of opportunity is about ten minutes. But the cadets had their questions prepared and they got all of them in and got answers in the time that was available to them.
“There was a lot of questions about how to become an astronaut. They do have a great space program in Canada and the United States, so we’ll get some of the cadets hooked up with that and maybe you’ll see some local cadets here, students in our area eventually apply to be in the space program,” McClinchey said.
When it was over a few of the students called it a once in a lifetime experience. McClinchey says over the past couple of years they’ve been able to get some sponsors to buy radios and that has really helped to get the cadets interested in the radio systems and how they interact with aerospace.
