John Glenn Top Gun Academy<\/a> Aerospace Honor Society at the St. Pete Museum of History.<\/p>\nThe students were already comfortable in their blue flight suits.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe want them to start training early, in terms of their interests, so they can start learning more \u2014 maybe taking more advanced classes when they get to high school, and kind of preparing them for the future in the areas of STEM because it\u2019s very desperately needed in our country,\u201d said Stewart Middle Magnet School lead teacher emeritus Lynn McDaniel.<\/p>\n
McDaniel said the school is a NASA Explorer STEM school, and regardless of where students interests may lie, teaching them about STEM and how it\u2019s used in space provides options.<\/p>\n
\u201cI like space, but I prefer the ground more,” eighth grader Grayson Luke said. “I\u2019m more interested in engineering and how everything works.”<\/p>\n
Students even heard from a Blue Origin representative and a real astronaut, Nicole Stott. And even for students like Grayson who prefer to be firmly planted on Earth, McDaniel said the opportunities are endless.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s careers in aerospace for them, they don\u2019t all have to be astronauts,” McDaniel said. “There\u2019s engineering, there\u2019s space medicine, so we\u2019re giving them experiences in all of that.”<\/p>\n
McDaniel\u00a0 said she hopes experiences like Friday’s will encourage students to later pursue careers that are out of this world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. \u2014\u00a0The global aerospace industry is projected to grow significantly, with estimates ranging from more than…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":47748,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[26539,274,5711,28,276,115,596,1769,202,204,203,199,201,200,135,278,835],"class_list":["post-47747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-app-space","tag-app-top-stories","tag-fallon-silcox","tag-florida","tag-hillsborough-county","tag-news","tag-pinellas-county","tag-space","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news","tag-tampa","tag-top-stories","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47747\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}