Mission & History
Providing professional development, payload flights, and space experiences to K-12 educators since 2014
Our Mission
At Teachers in Space, Inc (TIS) our mission is to stimulate student interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) by offering teachers an engineering focused space science curriculum, flight experiences, space opportunities, and industry connections. Our initiatives spark a transfer of passion for space science and exploration from teachers to their students. We look forward to fulfilling our vision: flying teachers to space with student developed, classroom experiments.
We offer professional development opportunities to K-12 teachers in an effort to bring space science into the classroom and provide teachers with the means to inspire their students to pursue careers in Aerospace and other commercial space endeavors. We are directly working to help develop the pipeline from schools across the country into the growing commercial space sector.
We align ourselves with diversity and equity goals shared by NASA and the National Science Foundation to bring our STEM programs and resources to historically underrepresented populations and communities, as well as EPSCoR targeted jurisdictions. Teachers in Space recognizes broadening participation of diverse groups and institutions in STEM as a key strategic goal to developing the highest quality workforce and research initiatives.
Our professional development workshops for STEM teachers include hands-on work with data sensors and remote device control, personal and experimental flight opportunities, and unique teaching materials and design challenges to take back to the classroom. We also provide opportunities to meet and interact with scientists and developers at NASA and commercial space companies.
Our History
TIS is inspired by NASA’s Teacher in Space program, which chose Christa McAuliffe among over 11,000 applicants to be the first schoolteacher to train as an astronaut and fly missions on the space shuttle in 1984. However, the Teacher in Space program ended without completing its first mission when Space Shuttle Challenger tragically broke up during flight in 1986.
By the time McAuliffe’s backup, Barbara Morgan, did fly in 2007, NASA had abandoned the idea of flying classroom teachers and returning them to their schools. As Morgan’s Shuttle commander, Scott Kelly, told a journalist, “I don’t have a teacher as a crew member. I have a crew member who used to be a teacher.”
Our Teachers in Space project was created to fulfill the promise of the original program. We already offer teachers authentic astronaut training and real space science experiences combined with information and resources to bring back to classrooms across America. From 2010 to 2013 NASA sponsored our teacher workshops, which were mainly about astronautics, space flight and space physiology. TIS also made its first step into high altitude balloon (HAB) missions. From 2015-2016 and again in 2022-2023 TIS worked with the Airbus Perlan Project. TIS flew CubeSat emulators carrying experiments developed by K-12 students on the Perlan2, stratospheric glider in Argentina. Today TIS offers a program of on-line and in-person training, personal and experiment flight opportunities on a wide array of atmospheric and space-based platforms, and contacts to NASA and the commercial space industry.
Our teachers and their students have done numerous high-altitude balloon missions, helped test the first multipurpose commercial spacesuit on a parabolic flight over Ottawa, Canada, and flown experimental payloads on gliders in the US and Argentina.