Former astronaut says students missing out
Former senator and astronaut Jake Garn was scheduled to give two speeches Saturday afternoon as part of the Blue Moon Festival.
The lack of attendance for the second scheduled speech, however, caused festival hosts to cancel the event.
“It’s hard to compete with Baby Animal Day,” said festival organizer Todd Mosher. “We’ll have to be a little more selective on the date next year.”
Mosher said the festival was conceived as a way to showcase all of the space achievements made within Cache Valley, as well as a reminder after the Columbia accident of the great things man can do with space exploration.
There were five displays set up in the Sunburst Lounge of the Taggart Student Center. The number of representatives from displays like Utah State University’s Get Away Special and the Space Dynamics Lab outnumbered the public attendance of the event.
Garn said USU students are missing out on a great opportunity by not learning about the things the university does with NASA. The lack of attendance at the Blue Moon Festival is an example of the students being uninformed of USU’s achievements, he said.
“I just hope [students] would understand that the Space Dynamics Lab is unique and that they are at a university that has put more objects into space than any other university on Earth,” Garn said. “They ought to be proud of that.”
Mosher said nearly 30 people attended the first speech Garn offered in the afternoon and then stuck around to watch the movie “Apollo 13.” At the scheduled start time of the second speech, there was only one person seated in the Ballroom.
While Garn did not have a large crowd to whom he could offer a second speech, he took some time to talk about his ideas on the current state of the space program.
“I don’t mean to minimize the tragedy of their [Columbia’s] loss, but people need to remember that there has never been a draftee on the space shuttle. All of us are volunteers,” he said. “We all knew exactly what we were doing, that there was danger involved, and we anticipate that you might not come back.”
Garn said he knew of all the risks when he flew on Discovery in 1985.
“We’ve got to get the space program going again, and those who are naysayers would have been the same types who would have told Columbus he shouldn’t cross the Atlantic.”
Garn said NASA will resume shuttle flights as soon as possible. After the Challenger shuttle accident in 1986, the shuttle fleet was grounded for 32 months – a delay that he said was much too long and political.
“We could have flown a lot sooner than 32 months,” he said. “I would hope, at the longest, that we’d be flying a year after the accident.”
When the space shuttles are allowed to fly again, Garn said, there will be plenty of astronauts who are willing to fly, with him being one of them. While he doubts he would actually go into space again, he said, he would take the opportunity in a snap if it came along.
“I’m only 70,” Garn said. “John Glenn was 77 when he went up, so I have a few more years.”
-str@cc.usu.edu