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'Can you hear me?' Tucson students make call to space (with video)

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It was 8:04 a.m. on Friday and the International Space Station was roughly 1,600 miles northwest of Tucson in orbit around the earth.

Miguel Enriquez, 59, a Pueblo Magnet High School math teacher and adviser to the Ham Radio Club, asked for silence before making contact with astronaut Clayton Anderson, a flight engineer aboard Expedition 15.

Students from Pueblo, Pistor Middle School, Jefferson Park Elementary and Drachman Primary Magnet schools — along with news crews and amateur radio operators — stood still.

"NA1SS this is KD7RPP. Can you hear me? Over," said Enriquez, repeating the message several times from his classroom at Pueblo at 3500 S. 12th Ave.

Connection was made and Anderson's signal from the space station was strong.

Twenty-nine students were lined up and each was ready to ask one question — a historic moment for Pueblo and youths who conversed with Anderson.

At 8:09 a.m., the space station, which carries astronauts working on experiments, was about 260 miles above Tucson. It was traveling at 17,500 mph, said Larry Brown, a member of the Radio Amateur Satellite Corp. and the American Radio Relay League.

Brown, a retired Raytheon Missile Systems engineer, helped build a satellite station at Pueblo to allow students to communicate with Anderson.

"When I was a kid, I had the Apollo program that inspired me to get into electronics. We have to create a whole new generation of young people to get excited and do this kind of work," Brown said.

Astronaut Anderson, a native of Omaha, Neb. who was born on Feb. 23, 1959, talked to the youths for about 14 minutes, answering questions including how many times he has orbited the Earth, what types of food he eats and why he wanted to become an astronaut.

Anderson launched to the space station June 8 aboard shuttle Atlantis and is set to return to Earth in December aboard Shuttle Discovery. He said the space station orbits the Earth 16 times a day and he has been in orbit for 105 days.

He said when he was a young boy, his parents would wake him up to watch Apollo 8 astronauts, and that excited him about becoming an astronaut. He said during takeoff it was difficult thinking about being away from his wife and children for months.

Anderson said the Internet is not available in space because NASA worries about hackers. He told students that watching Earth from space is beautiful, and that when he returns he will be a better steward of the planet.

When saying goodbye he told students it was an honor and privilege to talk to them, the youths broke out in applause.

"I'm definitely excited about this. This is a big deal for us," said sophomore Daniel Carrillo, 15, a member of the radio club who plans on becoming an electrical engineer. "We've come a long way since we started the club last year."

Enriquez said the club tried to make connection with the space station last year but was not able to because of inferior equipment.

He laughed while recalling that fellow teacher José Velasco was on "the roof of the portable classroom rotating the antenna by hand trying to track the satellite as it hurtled above the sky at 17,000 miles per hour."

But Enriquez and students did not give up.

He began writing funding proposals and received more than $14,000 from foundations, businesses and radio operators to buy the state-of-the-art equipment that made contact with the ISS possible.

"We want to get the kids to start thinking and appreciate math and science," Enriquez said.

"Most of our math and science student majors in colleges right now are from other countries. If we lose that competitive advantage, we will never get it back," Enriquez said.

On StarNet: Check out a video of the students conversation with space at azstarnet.com/video.