Ber-New-Who?

I don't really remember 5th grade, but I'm sure I wasn't studying physics and flying Cessnas. Or designing rockets and studying atmospheric pressure, either. ("What's that mean, Everett?") I think the most important thing for me back then was jumping on my friend Stephanie's trampoline and blowing my whistle on Junior Traffic Police.

My how times have changed. Madalyn was fortunate to be able to participate in the Department of Defense program STARBASE at Maxwell Air Force Base over the past five weeks. While there she and her classmates built and launched their own rockets, flew a Cessna 172-P (simulator, thank heavens!), studied Bernoulli's Principle & Newton's Law of Motion (don't ask me), fluid mechanics and aerodynamics, and learned navigation and mapping, computer aided design, geometry and data analysis. Whew, brain overload! Oh, and they rode a hovercraft, too.

Here, she and a friend are sucking all the air out of a vacuum container that has a miniature marshmallow in it. It was miniature when they started, anyway.

They'd just finished jumping around the room like molecules in motion. Guess something about that was funny to her.

Aren't they cute? Leave it to her to pose in a flight suit. It would've been cool to keep the flight suit, eh?

Guess my tax dollars are going to something worthwhile after all.