On the 21st of July 2004 it will have been exactly 35 years from the day when man, specifically Neil Alden Armstrong, first stepped on the Moon. Since that day space exploration has largely become part of everyday life and people have turned to new horizons in seeking to leave their imprint on the world and thus helping to expand global knowledge and understanding. This has caused man to forget about the Moon. To remedy this, a select Czech group of solely child astronauts is about to attempt lunar landing - the members of which will be the winners of the great elimination competition of the "Space" Expedition.

Background:

The selected team will consist of the first child astronauts to fly to the Moon, its objective being to visit the site where Neil Armstrong originally landed and to document it archeologically. The duration of the journey to the Moon will be spent on scientific experimentation. The team successfully enters the Moon's orbit, but then a meteor collision damages the rocket ship. The crew successfully secures the breach, but the ship lacks oxygen to return to Earth. The remaining oxygen will last the crew 12 hours at most. At that moment a second ship launches from Earth to the rescue. It has to establish a precise connection with the damaged ship, a process plagued by many difficulties (like the attachments of the connection module are twisted and the rescue team must replace them to fix the problem). Finally, the damaged ship is repaired and both ships successfully land on the Moon.

And so ends the first part of the project and begins the development of a lunar base, and eventually a future city. The street foundations are laid; methods of transportation are developed along with oxygen creation, lunar law, culture, etc. This is a creation of a new civilization, where the children will even decide on which particular political system to use in their new community. The goal of the "Space" Expedition is the increase interest in modern cosmic research in children on the secondary grade levels at elementary schools. It consists of three phases:

1. Completion of homework assignments by the children (January-February 2004)

A data CD with assignments is sent out to participating schools. The CD contains video, sound and text files which the teachers will play for the children, and which will serve an educational purpose as well as pose questions to the viewers. It may be better to create web pages on a public server where the questions would be presented and where participants could fill out an interactive registration. Perhaps it could also make use of some interesting code-breaking storyline. Everything would be done in a creative way so as not to just collect information but also foster problem-solving skills, etc. The concept of the assignments would be applicable to girls and boys, as well as healthy children and those physically handicapped. There will be a number of roles on the astronaut team that we will need to fill: the main pilot, medic, etc. There should be a requirement from the beginning that the selected group be composed of many different types of children both healthy and handicapped, as well as from various ethnic backgrounds. But this is a type of positive discrimination, and I'm not sure I like it.

Midphase: Evaluation of submitted answers

Evaluation performed by an expert panel with ing. M. Grün, O. Pelčák, Arch. Tomáš Brix, Dr. Jaroslav Sýkora, Dr. K. Humhal, Arch. Vlado Milunić, Dr. Petr Jakeš and other members of the supervising committee. The committee will select 25 participants and place them into five even teams to move to the next round.

2. The meeting of the five selected teams (May 2004)

The five teams selected from the first round will undergo an astronaut boot camp at the "space" preparation training centre (a Czech military base). They will simulate rocket ship launches; learn space navigation, movement in an unknown terrain, and teamwork; improve their physical shape; and solve logical problems. They will be schooled as real astronauts. The result of the training will be the selection of two final teams of five members each, the first being the team to launch and the second being the backup.

There will be a submerged run in the swimming pool with the aqualung simulating a weightless state.

3. Flight into space (July 2004)

While team no. 1 is flying into space in the Prague Planetarium, team no. 2 is in the control centre and is organizing all aspects of the flight, performing health checks, etc. The medic has the team's pulse on her monitor, the engineer is supervising the state of the rocket ship, the navigator is watching its course, etc.

Communication with the rocket is done via videoconferencing and walkie-talkie. The computers are monitoring the vital signs of the crew and contain a hidden scenario for the ship crisis. After the collision occurs, the vital signs of the crew and the state of the ship will deteriorate and it will be necessary to react extremely quickly.

The goal of "Houston" will be to save the astronauts. The goal of the crew in space will be to do exactly what Huston tells them to do and thus allow the crew to return home.

The project of "Space" Expedition follows on the heels of another project of the same name which was prepared in 1988 by the Czech public Radio together with the Prague Planetarium. During that project, the international child astronaut team flew around the Earth, solved scientific problems, and communicated with the earthbound base, while inside a rocket ship simulator.