Thousands of Israeli middle school students will study space science and will even launch three experiments at the International Space Station as the Ramon Space Lab program expands to 100 schools in the coming school year, the Education Ministry said on Sunday. The Ramon Space Lab program, which promotes space education among Israeli school students, was named after Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, who was killed in the space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, and his son Asaf, a fighter pilot who was killed in a training accident in 2009, and is a collaboration between the Education Ministry, the Israel Space Agency, and the Ramon Foundation. As part of the program, students will meet with NASA astronauts and scientists and even see their own work launched into space. The project-based learning program, which ran as a pilot in 12 schools over the past year, will this year include thousands of eighth- and ninth-graders in 100 Jewish and Arab schools. Student teams will compete against each other to submit experiment proposals, and the three winning teams will send vials into space in February 2017, most likely with a Falcon 9 multi-use rocket. An astronaut on the International Space Station will carry out the research on their behalf, and the students will analyze the results. "The Ramon Space Lab is one of the most exciting and most advanced space and science programs in the world. We are fulfilling a dream by introducing it to all Israeli students," Ramon Foundation CEO Ran Livne told Israel Hayom Sunday. Aviva Breiner, who heads the Science and Technology Department at the Education Ministry, said the program "makes space accessible to teens and instills advanced scientific knowledge in an exciting and interactive way."
