Students Study Human Spaceflight While Exploring Greece This Summer

As they immersed themselves in Greek culture, they began to understand the similarities between exploring a new and unfamiliar landscape and exploring a planet in space—living and working on a sailboat in the Aegean Sea was analogous to traveling on a spacecraft. Scuba diving mimicked wearing a spacesuit in the low gravity environment of space. Preparing for and hiking up to a mountaintop retreat related to preparing for an EVA on a distant planet, while working and living in the mountain lodge correlated to being in an extraterrestrial habitat.

In the final video project of the student’s time in Greece, Nick Lopac, a sophomore spaceflight operations major said the class learned, through their adventures, what it takes to simulate a mission on Earth. They realized what was involved in keeping an astronaut safe in space and ultimately, how to explore, leaving the familiar behind, whether on this planet or beyond.