Evan Cota digs the science of space.
He digs the powerful rocket launches. He digs the thrill of scientific discoveries beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
“How we live, how there are so many different planets,” the 13-year-old from Orlando said. “It’s very interesting.”
But don’t expect him to be first in line to travel on a rocket into space.
“That would be too overwhelming,” he said.
Instead, Cota was at Orlando Science Center for a space exploration event that included a station where he could build a contraption in which an egg could survive a 15-foot drop.
The goal was to help represent, in a safe way for children, the landing of NASA’s rover vehicle onto the surface of Mars in 2012.
The builders had limited resources, which forced them to think creatively.
Some built a bed of toothpicks for the egg to rest on. Others tied string through straws, which were attached to a newspaper that would act as a parachute.
Their mission: discover a way to softly land the egg and not create a mess, said Jesse Zito, the science center’s manager of public programs.
Zito has been a space enthusiast since he was very young.
“It’s the most impressive thing I can think of,” he said. “It’s gigantic and fascinating. It’s a branch of science where there is constantly new information coming out.”
Much of that new data has been gathered by science experiments that have launched to the International Space Station from the coast of Florida.
As the space industry grows here, more frequent launches from companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the Boeing Defense-Lockheed Martin Space Systems partnership United Launch Alliance have meant more chances to create a spark of enthusiasm in children, said Justin Cirillo of the Central Florida Astronomical Society.
An expected 2020 launch of astronauts from U.S. soil will boost that even further, he said.
“I’m excited to know we are making so much progress to launch Americans from U.S. soil,” Cirillo said. “There is so much interest and the general public is coming around to its importance.”
As a kid in Michigan, Eric Hoin used a newspaper’s daily inclusion of the phase of the moon to predict what the sky would bring each night.
That was one of the first times he felt an interest in astronomy, which he has never shaken.
“When you show somebody, it creates that curiosity in people to see things with our own eyes,” the said Hoin, a Central Florida-based astronomer.
The activities available for visitors on Saturday were an effort to expose more people to the high-tech area of interest, both real and fictional.
A group of cosplayers dressed as characters from the movie series “Star Trek” took pictures.
A crafts workshop let creative types build structures that could be added to a table, which was set up to represent the surface of Mars.
A space trivia spinning wheel was busy.
It’s a way to boost curiosity that could eventually help encourage young people to get involved in the growing field, Zito said.
“We are entering into a new era of exploration,” he said. “There is a lot more opportunity for kids to get involved in something that could end up being humongous.”
