Schoolchildren from Verkhnyaya Salda "flew" from Baikonur to the ISS

Photo: Press Service of the Empathy Foundation

 

SVERDLOVSK REGION

 

The online course of the Summer Space School at Secondary School No. 1 of Verkhnyaya Salda ended with the flight simulation of the Soyuz-MS spacecraft. The classes were organized with the support of the Empathy Charity Foundation by Mikhail Shelkov. 

 

The Foundation's press service has informed RusBusinessNews that the Summer Space School (SSS) is a growing community of cosmonautics enthusiasts, which also includes young residents of the town. Eighth-grade student Zakhar Rybakov and sixth-grade students Denis Romanov and Viktor Zuev, under the guidance of astronomy teacher Vera Deryabina and technical director of the SSS Sergey Lemeshchenko, lifted the Soyuz-2 launch vehicle from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, docked it to the orbital station in manual mode, and landed. 

 

The children took on the roles of the crew, controlling the spacecraft in the Kerbal Space Program, and Mission Control specialists, helping to calculate manoeuvres, adjust the heading, and carry out the mission plan.

 

The SSS offers a variety of scenarios: changing equipment (launch vehicles, spacecrafts, orbital station modules, automatic interplanetary station (AIS), and others), launch site (Baikonur, Vostochny, or Cape Canaveral cosmodromes), and mission time (in the past, present, or future).

 

Mikhail Shelkov, the founder of Empathy, considers the support of young talents to be one of the key areas in the work of the Foundation. He believes that a student can become aware of themselves as the authors of their own education and take a proactive position in this process. In addition to paying student scholarships and cash prizes to 100-point graduates and winners of olympiads, the Empathy Foundation develops the creative potential of children: it organizes training courses and holds events with the participation of invited psychologists. In 2021, the first engineering accelerator for teenagers on the improvement of Verkhnyaya and Nizhnyaya Salda was held. The four winning teams have already begun to implement their unusual projects and defend them at All-Russian conferences.