CAMDEN, N.J. -- Most eyes will be on Sally Ride, the first woman astronaut, when the Space Shuttle Challenger blasts off this weekend, but 70 New Jersey students will be watching Norma.
Norma is a queen ant and the star of Orbit '81, a special program designed to put ants into space and get more minority group students interested in science and engineering.
Norma and the rest of the ant colony will be aboard Challenger in a special canister,
Scientists and the Camden, N.J., students involved in Orbit '81 will be watching the ants closely to see how the ant society reacts to life in space.
'The launch is merely the icing on the cake,' said Fred Reiss, chairman of the Science Department at Camden High, one of two Camden schools involved in Orbit '81, named after the year the colony was originally set to fly.
'By next year, almost 50 percent of the school will be taking science courses,' he said. 'Before this, maybe it was 30 percent.'
Many of the students who began the project five years ago now attend college and major in math, science or engineering, he said.
Norman Alston, a Camden High School senior, said the project has made him develop a health respect for ants.
'Now I don't step on their colonies anymore,' he said Tuesday before leaving for Kennedy Space Center with some 70 other students involved in Orbit '81.
The colony is the culmination of five years of work by the students who chose and built the project, the teachers who taught the students, and by RCA, which funded it.
'I never thought it would go up,' said Blanche Watkins, 18, who plans to study chemical engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology.
'I never could be an astronaut, I'm scared of heights,' she said. 'Everybody wants to be an engineer.'
