In the Classroom:

“Wow, NASA’s awesome!” a boy cried, as he threw a foam glider into the air.

Typically bored and difficult to impress, the sixth-grader was elated Monday, when kids at Kaiser Elementary School set their sights on the stars.

A NASA representative taught them about an upcoming lunar mission. After viewing videos about the mission and learning more about conditions on the moon, the elementary school students were treated to a middle-school-level project, in which they created gliders from foam plates and pennies. The program is free to the school, Principal Gerald Vlasic said.

“As human beings, we are explorers,” Sandy Kaszynski of the NASA Aerospace Education Services Project told students.

From Pilgrims on the Mayflower to Neil Armstrong’s fateful first step, mankind has shown an extraordinary propensity to take risks for the possibility of discovery, she said.

Longtime Kaiser teacher Linda Galloway has a long history with Kaszynski, a close friend.

“I had her daughter 14 years ago [in class],” she said. “She set me up with my husband.”

Their friendship has been a boon to Galloway’s students, who are given plenty of opportunities for hands-on science.

A former Newport-Mesa Unified teacher herself, Kaszynski took her own giant leap when she moved to NASA earlier this year.

“I am just so in love with it,” she said. “I’ve always been a huge NASA fan.”

She first became fascinated by science during the 1969 moon landing.

She came to Kaiser Elementary on Monday to teach sixth-graders about a current mission to find ways to sustain life on Earth’s closest neighbor.

Early in the morning Oct. 9, a NASA satellite will crash-land on the moon, creating a plume that will likely be visible from amateur telescopes with good weather conditions.

“If we can find water on the moon, that’s huge,” she said. “If it’s confirmed, by 2020 we’ll be able to set up on the moon.”

The discovery will be critical to future colonizing efforts.

“It costs $15,000 to take one quart of water to the moon,” Kaszynski said. “If we can find water ice, we can live off the land.”

And it could create a bridge to a Mars mission, she said.

Such innovations will come from those who are now sitting in elementary, junior high and high school seats, Kaszynski told the students.

“The three people who are going to set foot on Mars are probably in high school right now,” she said.