Pupils from Secondary School No. 1 successfully simulated the flight of the Soyuz-MS spacecraft. This open lesson concluded the online course of the Summer Space School on cosmonautics, astrophysics and space engineering, organized in Verkhnyaya Salda with the support of Mikhail Shelkov's Empathy Charitable Foundation.
The Summer Space School (SSS) is a growing community of space enthusiasts, which now includes Salda school children. Eighth-grader Zakhar Rybakov and two 6th-graders, Denis Romanov and Viktor Zuev, under the guidance of astronomy teacher Vera Deryabina and LSS technical director Sergey Lemeshchenko, demonstrated masterful control of the Soyuz-2 launch vehicle from the Baikonur Cosmodrome to the orbital station, as well as manual docking and landing.
During the space flight simulation, the children tried on the roles of the spacecraft crew and specialists of the Mission Control Center (MCC). School children acted like real astronauts: they oriented the spacecraft in the right direction, switched on and off the engine at a strictly calculated time and manually docked with the orbital station.
Mikhail Shelkov, the founder of Empathy, considers the support of young talents to be one of the key areas of the foundation’s work. The entrepreneur believes that a student should recognize themselves as being the author of their own education and take an active position in this process. In addition to student scholarships, cash prizes for high school graduates and winners of Olympiads, the foundation also aims to unlock the creative potential of children: it organizes training courses and holds events with guest psychologists. Last year, Empathy launched, for the first time, an engineering accelerator for teenagers with the aim of improving Verkhnyaya and Nizhnyaya Salda. The 4 winning teams that proposed the most unusual solutions have already started putting their projects into practice and showcasing them at all-Russian conferences.