Brehm selected to participate in aerospace residency

The Washington Aerospace Scholars program is pleased to announce that Matthew Brehm from Lind-Ritzville High School will be participating in one of the four WAS Summer Residency sessions held in June and July at the Museum of Flight in Seattle. Washington Aerospace Scholars (WAS) is a competitive educational program, based at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, for high school juniors from across Washington state.

Brehm is among the 160 students who qualified for the Washington Aerospace Scholars Summer Residency program from 285 students who applied in November. To qualify for the residency program, they spent five months studying a University of Washington (UW) and NASA-designed, distance-learning curriculum via the Internet and have been selected to attend one of the four residencies hosted at The Museum of Flight in Seattle this summer based on their academic performance on the distance-learning lessons.

During the residency experience, students will collaborate on the design of a human mission to Mars. WAS scholars are guided by professional engineers, scientists, university students and certified educators as they plan these missions. The WAS program is designed to inspire students to pursue degrees and careers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) but the students are divided into teams which also require them to learn about mission management, budgets, the legal aspects of space exploration, and medicine.

In addition to the design of the human mission to Mars, Brehm and the other WAS scholars will also participate in a number of hands-on engineering challenges. These challenges included design, construction and deployment of robotic rovers, model rockets, lander devices, and payload lofting systems.

Summer residency participants will also receive briefings from experts in the fields of engineering, science, physics, medicine, project management, risk management, and space exploration, such as Dr. Bonnie J. Dunbar, NAE, retired NASA astronaut. They will also visit Everett for a behind-the-scenes tour of the Boeing Commercial Airplane assembly plant, tour Aerojet’s Redmond facilities, and the engineering laboratories at UW.

Washington Aerospace Scholars will be accepting applications for students and teachers in early September for the 2013-2014 program cycle; visit http://www.museumofflight.org/was to download an application.

For more information, contact Washington Aerospace Scholars at 206-764-5866 or [email protected].