Published: August 19, 2009 05:15 pm      

Shooting for the Stars

GREENVILLE — Sitting on a couch in front of a large telescope purchased at a garage sale, pondering her life as her mother cooks dinner, Lisa Malone is modest, but her dreams are anything but humble.

Malone dreams of one day becoming an astronaut and is already well on her way to achieving that goal.

“This is going to sound incredibly cheesy, but I grew up watching Star Trek: Voyager,” said Malone. “I really think that’s where a lot of it came from, just seeing how amazing it could be and then tying it in to what we’ve already done and what we, in reality, can do. I wanted to be a part of that exploration.”

A senior this year at Greenville High School, Malone was one of two students from GHS that spent six days at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) as part of the 2009 NASA High School Aerospace Scholars Program.

“I saw an article in the newspaper about a guy that had done it a couple of years ago,” said Malone. “I was in tenth grade at the time and I was so excited and ready to sign up right then but it was only for juniors. I had the newspaper clipping pinned up on the cabinet for a year waiting to sign up for it.”

Before making the trip to Houston she began completing 10 web-based lessons, due every two weeks, in December.

The lesson included a variety of activities like reading online curriculum, writing essays, designing upgrades to be used on the Shuttle and the International Space Station (ISS), solving math problems and taking online quizzes.

“It wasn’t incredibly difficult,” said Malone. “Math and science comes fairly easily to me. I understand the concepts well, but I’m not the biggest fan of writing essays and such.”

After completing the lessons, Malone was selected to participate in the summer session at the JSC, where she got to tour the places the public rarely gets to glimpse.

“We went through the kind of back door of NASA,” said Malone. “We went to Mission Control, historic Mission Control, the neutral buoyancy lab and the water treatment facility where they were discovering new ways to reuse water effectively. Stuff the public doesn’t see on a regular basis.”

She even got to meet Eugene “Gene” Kranz, a retired NASA Flight Director best known for his role in directing the successful Mission Control team efforts to save the crew of Apollo 13.

“That was absolutely incredible,” she said. “We got to sit in Historic Mission Control and listen to him basically recount his life at NASA and then take pictures with him and shake his hand afterwards. He only comes one week out of the summer and it happened to be our week. We were bouncing off the walls in excitement.”

One of the main team project Malone worked on was designing a trip to Mars. There were four groups that worked on this project and each group was given a particular assignment, such as “mission integration”, “getting there”, “living there” and “working there.”

“They split us up into four groups,” she said. “My group section was working on Working on Mars, what we would need for experiments, space suits, that sort of thing was our job. We had to coordinate with the other groups to make sure everything was aligned. It was really cool learning how to integrate with the other teams while still focusing and pushing for what you needed.”

Once they completed this team project it was presented to the parents in PowerPoint at the close of the week.

“It was incredible,” she said. “I learned so much in such a short time. I don’t know what I expected, but I loved the end result none-the-less.”

After graduation, Malone plans on attending Texas A&M-College station where she will major in Aerospace Engineering.

“I really want to work at NASA,” she said. “Period. End of sentence. I’m not sure exactly what I want to do there, I would love to be an astronaut. That’s the ultimate dream job, but that’s really difficult. Regardless, I definitely want to be at NASA.”

Before her six-day stay at the JSC, Malone was undecided about what college to attend and what major she should choose.

“I knew I wanted to work at NASA, but I didn’t really know where I wanted to go to college and what to major in,” said Malone. “Going there really helped solidify that I wanted to go to space myself and right now, the best way to do that is to have an aerospace engineering degree Before that I was leaning toward astronomy or astrophysics.”

The risks involved with being an astronaut don’t seem to deter Malone.

“There’s risks involved with almost anything,” said Malone. “There’s risks involved in driving a car. I feel like there’s so much more to be gained than worrying about what could happen.”

In true Star Trek style, Malone dreams of going where no man, or in this case woman, has gone before.

“I’d want to go somewhere that is completely foreign,” she said. “Somewhere that is nothing like Earth, like nothing we’ve ever seen before and discover new things.”