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Talk about an out of this world school project.
On April 7, the Grade 1 and Grade 6-7 students at Fort Assiniboine School received a very special (albeit somewhat late) delivery: the postcards they had sent into outer space one year before, aboard the shuttle New Shepard.
“Who has a postcard that went to outer space and back? Isn't that neat? It’s kind of exciting,” said Kindergarten teacher Colleen Kiselyk, whose class was involved in the project.
So how did this all come about?
Kiselyk explained that the Kindergarten class at Fort Assiniboine partners each year with the Tomatosphere program, where elementary students plant two batches of tomato seeds as part of an experiment to determine the possible effects of zero gravity on growing conditions.
TomatoSphere is itself an initiative of Let’s Talk Science, a national organization that is funded by the Government of Canada and delivers science, technology, engineering and math programs to students across the country.
Because of their participation in Tomatosphere, the Fort Assiniboine students also had an additional opportunity: to send their postcards into the edge of outer space via shuttle.
The vessel in question was the Blue Origin ship New Shepard, which was named for the first American astronaut in space (Mark Shepard).
New Shepard carried its payload of postcards past the Kårmån line — the internationally recognized boundary of space roughly 100 kilometres above Earth’s mean sea level — at some point in 2021.
The shuttle has flown into space multiple times, so it isn’t really clear when the Fort Assiniboine students’ postcards actually went up. Upon return, however, the postcards were all marked with an official “Flown to Space” stamp.
The cards were blank, but the Kindergarten and Grade 5 students who worked together on the project were invited to decorate them with a space theme and also answer a question: what jobs will be needed to feed astronauts on the moon or Mars?
"They all did a very good job on that,” Kiselyk said.
Finally, she said they put Fort Assiniboine School as the return address for the postcards, which is how they got their package back roughly a year later.
