NASA astronaut Anil Menon will answer prerecorded STEM questions from students at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center in Concord, New Hampshire, via a live Earth-to-space call from the International Space Station. The event streams at 11:35 a.m. EDT on Thursday, September 24, on NASA's Learn With NASA YouTube channel. The downlink targets K-12 students and community members, hosted by a discovery center named after Christa McAuliffe — the Concord teacher killed in the 1986 Challenger disaster. That lineage is not accidental. The venue selection ties NASA's outreach to a specific local memory of spaceflight's human stakes, giving the event emotional weight beyond a standard video call. These in-flight education downlinks are a long-running NASA program, connecting classrooms directly to crew aboard the ISS. They cost almost nothing relative to the agency's budget but generate outsized local media coverage and student engagement. The model is replicable and decentralized — any school or institution can apply. Menon is currently on a long-duration mission aboard the ISS, conducting science and research. The call is one of many routine crew activities designed to maintain public connection to the station's purpose. For NASA, every downlink is a small deposit in the political bank account that funds future missions. The ISS has been continuously occupied for over 25 years. NASA frames the station as a foundation for the Artemis lunar program and eventual Mars missions. These education events serve that narrative by keeping human spaceflight visible to the generation that would staff those programs. Media covering the event must RSVP by 5 p.m. EDT Wednesday, September 23, to Kelly Thompson at kthompson@starhop.com. The low barrier to entry for both media and participants is part of the design — accessibility is the point. This is not a major policy event. It is a small, well-designed piece of STEM infrastructure maintenance. The question is whether the pipeline these events feed actually connects to jobs and programs downstream, or whether the inspiration stays aspirational.
