A woman’s place is in science
Last October in a noisy ballroom in Nashville, Tenn., six girls sat at a round table to design a spacecraft that could land on the moon. They started by thinking about ways the craft could fail. If it lands too hard, for example, the astronauts could be injured or killed. And a parachute won’t help. It works only when it falls through the air — which the moon doesn’t have. At length, the girls settled on two designs. Both relied on springs to soften the landing.
Then came the harder part: Building and testing models. That wouldn’t be easy, considering that their materials were limited to a few drinking straws, a couple of notecards, a small paper cup and a handful of marshmallows. The marshmallows represented the astronauts. The cup was the spacecraft.
Read more in my recent piece for Science News for Students, here.