Astronaut A Blast For Students Nasa’s Tom Jones Takes Priest River Students On A Journey Of Imagination

Their rockets were all lined up in a row. Space shuttles and planets decorated the walls of Priest River Elementary School.

The children in Chris Naccarato’s class sat at attention.

They waited, fidgeting. Anxious whispers passed from desk to desk.

Then Naccarato appeared in the doorway and announced, “Team, this is Dr. Jones.”

The astronaut had arrived.

Tom Jones, a space shuttle astronaut, strode to the front of the room amid a standing ovation.

He greeted the class and began the allday business of answering questions, class by class, from a schoolful of curious children.

What’s the temperature in space?

“In the sun, 250 degrees Fahrenheit. In the shady side of earth, minus 200 degrees Fahrenheit.”

Have you ever seen Pluto?

“No, it’s so far away that a person can only see it with a very powerful telescope.”

What does your body feel like when you’re in the atmosphere?

“On the way up or on the way down?” he clarified. “On the way down, weight comes back gradually, but after being weightless for 11 days, you feel like you’re wearing a lead suit of clothes.”

Jones has been an astronaut for five years and flew two missions on the space shuttle Endeavor last year.

Naccarato’s fourth-graders knew all about Jones before he came because they had been corresponding with him since the beginning of the school year. They followed the Space Radar Lab 2 flight last fall, during which Jones and the other astronauts took 14,000 photos and hundreds of radar photos of Earth.

The students even spoke with Jones in a special video conference in December and, with a lot of help from their teacher, raised $1,049 to bring him to Priest River.

They had been looking forward to this moment for some time, and were wellprepared.

They assembled a jigsaw puzzle of the space shuttle for him, readied their model rockets and memorized “Mission Control,” a song their music teacher taught them.

A few students brought gifts. Jessica Dalton made Jones a Lego shuttle and flatbed truck. Brittany Strenke, with the help of her father, made a bird feeder in the form of a shuttle and booster rocket.

The class also added a special model rocket to its collection in honor of Jones - Sigma 7, the rocket used in the Gemini space mission. Wally Schirra, who flew on that mission, was the first astronaut Jones had met as a college student, pursuing his dream of space flight.

Lesson No. 1, he told them: To be successful you must set goals.

“The most important thing I did was decide in fifth grade that I wanted to be an astronaut,” Jones told the students. “It took me 25 years, but now I have the job.”

Secondly, he said, learn to be a good reader, because reading is the most important skill to have for nearly all fields.

“The third thing is to never give up,” he said. “I sent my application to NASA three times before I ever got hired.”

A few of Naccarato’s students will accompany their special guest to Spokane today to the studios of Educational Service District 101 for its Young Astronauts satellite class.

There, Jones’ image will be beamed to schools across the country via interactive video, allowing hundreds of students the opportunity to talk to a real, live astronaut.