OUR TURN: MFISD teachers show sky doesn’t have to be the limit

Four Marble Falls Independent School District teachers this week boldly will go where no MFISD educator has gone before.

Actually, they’re going where few have ever gone before, with the exception primarily of pilots, scientists and engineers in the astronaut corps.

On Thursday, these intrepid explorers will take up residence at the Johnson Space Center near Houston to begin training for a zero-gravity flight over the Gulf of Mexico.

During that two-hour flight at 30,000 feet, they will be subjected to 25 or so parabolic maneuvers that simulate weightlessness, or zero G.

But there’s more to the journey than just a thrill ride.

The four teachers also will conduct an experiment that someday could help astronauts raise fish or grow crops on long space flights, including missions to other planets.

These explorations could lead to future colonies on Mars, satellites such as the moon or even mining stations in the Asteroid Belt.

The implications are fantastic. Just think — future spacefarers could be dining on real food, not the freeze-died or microwave stuff, thanks to the efforts of a handful of dedicated educators from Marble Falls.

Talk about a cosmic legacy.

Of course, they didn’t come up with this project alone. They had plenty of help from their students.

They devised an experiment that examines how weightlessness effects the way oxygen dissolves in water. The project basically mimics how fish strip oxygen out of their liquid environment. It’s part of a study involving aquaculture.

Sounds pretty brainy.

It also goes to show the kind of excellence routinely produced by the school district when teachers and students are allowed to let their imaginations roam.

In the meantime, the community should give these teachers a tip of the hat and bid them a good journey.

Their participation in this fledgling NASA project — they are among the first group of educators to go up — speaks well both for themselves and the school district.

Marble Falls Middle School teacher Sasha Chesnut, Marble Falls High School teachers Randy Guffey and David Smith and Marble Falls Elementary School teacher Debbie Phillips are the researchers picked for this historic voyage of discovery.

Guffey is a natural, of course, since he’s the high school’s aeroscience teacher and is an expert on rocketry. For a few years now, he’s led teams of high school students and younger pupils on their own voyages of discovery by building bigger and better rockets during class and special camps.

The other teachers, however, have been chosen because they too embody the desire to seek knowledge, to push back the barriers of ignorance.

What they’re doing now equals or surpasses nearly anything the district has done before, whether it’s a playoff title or a campus being rated academically exemplary.

These teachers and their students are taking part in something bigger than all of us; they are helping to ensure the survival of the human race.

If we can keep from killing ourselves, blowing up everything or poisoning our environment, we will eventually reach for the stars — just as many of our ancestors set sail for a better life in the New World.

The heavens beckon.

And thanks to the work of these teachers and their students — which in in turn reflects the support this entire community provides to the education process  — we might just get there.