NASA’s ambitious plan to send humans to Mars in the 2030s is certainly exciting—but a lot needs to be done to make that happen. One critical factor for success is ensuring that there will be a strong and skilled workforce of engineers and scientists to help get us there.
Enter Generation Beyond, an ambitious program launched by Lockheed Martin in 2016, which aims to build and train the workforce that will be needed for deep space exploration by getting the nation’s future engineers hooked on STEM while they’re still young.
“Think about this,” said Gary Napier from Lockheed Martin. “The first astronaut to step foot on Mars – she is in school right now, in middle school or elementary school, and we want to inspire her, to really grab her attention to say, ‘It’s possible. It can be you.”
ENGINEERING.com visited Napier in the Lockheed Martin booth at the USA Science and Engineering Festival, where he shared the goals of Generation Beyond and its centerpiece, the Mars Experience Bus.
“Generation Beyond is a cool initiative that inspires kids about STEM—science, technology, engineering and math—using deep space exploration and the allure of going to Mars,” Napier explained.
The Mars Experience Bus is a key component of this strategy, featuring a school bus outfitted with screens and a sound system that offers young students a taste of the future with a virtual reality tour across the Martian surface.
“Once the kids get in, the windows transform and it’s the Martian landscape. We worked with the same guys who did The Martian movie, and now we are driving this bus down the road and the kids can see the Martian landscape moving by, we see the Curiosity Rover, we see a futuristic Mars base. It’s just a cool, immersive virtual reality experience,” Napier said.
The Generation Beyond initiative also offers resources and curriculum materials for teachers and parents to teach STEM subjects using deep space exploration topics. The initiative also created an app called Hello Mars, which allows students to explore information about Mars and even get weather and temperature reports.
The goal is to get these kids into STEM early in their lives so that they will pursue higher education and careers in the future tech workforce.
“We are absolutely going to need a huge number of engineers and scientists in our future. We’re always bringing in more young, new talent, so we want those kids who are just stoked about science and exploration and space to come and work for us. We want them for the technology economy that we have in the United States and around the world, so it’s paramount that we get these kids really excited about engineering and math,” Napier added.
To learn more, visit Lockheed Martin’s Generation Beyond website.