In 1969, a 10-year-old girl was told by her mother to sit in front of their black and white television and watch Neil Armstrong take man’s first walk on the moon. It was at this historic moment that young Wendy Lawrence became mesmerized and said, “That’s what I want to do when I grow up.”

Lawrence, captain in the U.S. Navy and a retired NASA astronaut, succeeded in making her childhood dream come true and is now encouraging all Alaska students to do the same.

Members of the Space Foundation have been visiting schools all around Alaska to inform today’s youth that even the outskirts of the universe is not out of their reach.

“We invited the Space Foundation because it’s about getting young people involved in math and science,” said Jim Dodson, president and CEO of the Fairbanks Economic Development Corporation. “One thing they say is that the next person on Mars is in America’s classroom today.”

Lawrence and other members of the Space Foundation attended a community dinner sponsored by the FEDC at Pike’s River Front Lodge on Nov. 1 to discuss the steady decline of science and engineering graduates in the United States.

According to Elliot Pulham, president and CEO of the Space Foundation, the United States recently graduated 75,000 science and engineering students, half of whom were foreign and took their knowledge back to their home country. Although this may seem like a large number, he said, Japan annually graduates 200,000 science students, India 400,000 and China 800,000. “In three to five years, 65 percent of the engineering workforce is going to retire,” Pulham said.

“It takes a lot of people with a lot of different skills to get to space,” said Pulham.

“We need to give them [students] something to be passionate about,” Lawrence said. “We need to give them something to dream about.”

Lawrence, who received a bachelor’s degree in ocean engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy and a master’s in ocean engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, decided not to pursue an engineering degree in aerospace after hearing widespread talk from fellow academy students about its difficulty. “I talked myself out of aerospace engineering because I thought I wasn’t smart enough,” said Lawrence, who has had the privilege of going to space four times.