A Piece of Space History Lands at the University of North Dakota: A New Era of Education

As the Orion Max Launch Abort System (MLAS) test vehicle rolled into the University of North Dakota (UND), it marked the beginning of a new chapter in the school's space education program. The 15-year-old mock spacecraft, which demonstrated one possible way of escaping a failing rocket, has finally found a new home after a week-long, 30-state road trip from the Langley Research Center in Virginia. But what does this mean for the students at UND, and what can they learn from this piece of space history? On July 8, 2009, the full-size Orion capsule, encased in a bullet-shaped fairing, leapt off the ground at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, climbing approximately one mile high and simulating an emergency on the launch pad. The "pad abort" test ended in just under a minute with the mock crew module separating from its boost skirt and deploying parachutes to splash down in the Atlantic Ocean. While NASA had already selected a different type of escape system to use with Orion, the MLAS demo was the first to conduct a full-scale fairing separation and contributed to the development of the spacecraft's parachutes.

So, what can students learn from this historic artifact? For starters, it's a tangible connection to NASA's past, and the struggles and successes that came with it. As Pablo de León, chair of the space studies department at UND, puts it, "The fact is, we are so far away from NASA centers, and we very seldom get pieces of historic significance. This is a major one." But what if we take it a step further? What if we consider the broader implications of this test, and how it relates to NASA's current efforts to return humans to the moon? De León and his graduate students plan to use the Orion MLAS as a teaching tool, showing students how it bridges NASA's past and future. But what about the present? What can we learn from this artifact about the current state of space exploration, and the challenges that come with it? As de León says, "We are seeing if we can, with the help of NASA, get a kind of a documentary produced on the capsule's flight and why it's important for the Artemis program, so kids can learn about the history of it and why it's important for the future."

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