COFFEE WITH SPACEMEN: WHAT ROCKET JOCKEYS TAUGHT ME ABOUT THE WAR ON PUBLIC SCHOOLS
A dispatch from the Big Education Ape — who once shared a table with the men who touched the stars, and never forgot where they came from.
Alright, settle in. Because what I'm about to tell you is going to sound like the opening line of a tall tale told by a man who's been in the sun too long. What if I told you I used to drink coffee with spacemen?
Go ahead. Say it. "The Big Education Ape has finally gone off his meds."
But here's the thing — I did. Every morning, at a table inside the cafeteria at Dryden Flight Research Center (now proudly renamed Neil Armstrong Flight Research Center), I sat within arm's reach of the men who had literally been to the moon and back. I wasn't a scientist. I wasn't an engineer. I was a contractor working for the company that ran NASA's retail services — the gift shop, the cafeteria, and yes, a roach coach (that's a mobile food truck for the uninitiated). I was essentially the guy making sure America's greatest heroes had a decent cup of coffee and a breakfast burrito before they went off to rewrite the laws of physics.
And every single day felt like an air show. Because at Dryden, it was.
The Year the Shuttle Learned to Fly — And I Was There
The year was 1977. The program was the Space Shuttle Approach and Landing Tests (ALT). The vehicle was the Enterprise — yes, named after that Enterprise, because 100,000 Trekkies wrote letters and NASA, in a rare moment of cosmic good humor, obliged.
The mission was elegantly terrifying: strap a 150,000-pound prototype space shuttle to the back of a modified Boeing 747, haul it up to 26,000 feet, and then let it go — with two astronauts inside — and hope it glides to a landing like a very expensive, very aerodynamic brick.
Spoiler: it worked. Mostly.
The crews were legends. Fred Haise and Gordon Fullerton. Joe Engle and Richard Truly. These men rode a glider the size of a small apartment building down to a dry lakebed at Edwards Air Force Base. No engine power. No second chances. Just math, muscle memory, and the kind of calm that makes the rest of us look like we're having a panic attack over a parking ticket.
I watched this. From the cafeteria. While refilling the coffee urns.
The conversations at those morning tables were something else entirely. Fly-by-wire systems. Cantilevered wings. Training the computers to think like a pilot. Most of it was classified. Most of it was miles above my pay grade. I didn't say much. I just listened, and poured coffee, and tried to look like a man who absolutely understood what "pilot-induced oscillation" meant. (I did not.)
The Guys Who Just Flew
Here's what nobody tells you about national heroes: they don't act like national heroes. They act like guys who just flew.
I got to know Deke Slayton well enough to ask him questions — real questions, about history, about the classified stuff, about what it was actually like. Deke was one of the original Mercury 7, grounded for years by a heart condition, who finally made it to space on the Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975 at age 51. The man waited sixteen years to fly. And he did it with the quiet patience of someone who simply never considered quitting.
Chuck Yeager walked through those doors too. Chuck Yeager. The man who broke the sound barrier in 1947 in a plane called Glamorous Glennis, flying with two broken ribs he'd hidden from the flight surgeon. He was just... there. Getting coffee. Like a regular person. Which he absolutely was not.
My "boss" at NASA was Frank Brown, though technically I was a contractor — a distinction that mattered enormously on paper and not at all at the coffee table. Frank was connected to the SR-71 Blackbird program, which meant that on any given Tuesday, the most classified aircraft in the American arsenal might taxi past the window while I was restocking the gift shop with Space Shuttle keychains.
I didn't fully grasp what I was witnessing. I was young. I was busy. The extraordinary had become, through sheer daily repetition, ordinary. That is perhaps the most human thing about working at the edge of the impossible — eventually, you stop being amazed and start worrying about whether the roach coach has enough napkins.
I regret the napkins. I should have been more amazed.
Public School Kids Who Touched the Stars
Here's the part that connects the rocket fuel to the classroom — and it's the part the billionaires don't want you to think about too hard.
Those men I had coffee with? They were public school kids.
Every single one of the Mercury 7 — the original astronauts, the ones who strapped themselves to missiles before anyone knew if it would work — came almost entirely from public schools and publicly funded institutions:
| Astronaut | High School | College | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| John Glenn | New Concord HS, OH (Public) | Muskingum College | Private Non-profit |
| Gus Grissom | Mitchell HS, IN (Public) | Purdue University | Public State |
| Alan Shepard | Pinkerton Academy, NH | U.S. Naval Academy | Public Federal |
| Wally Schirra | Dwight Morrow HS, NJ (Public) | U.S. Naval Academy | Public Federal |
| Scott Carpenter | Boulder HS, CO (Public) | University of Colorado | Public State |
| Gordon Cooper | Shawnee HS, OK (Public) | Air Force Inst. of Tech. | Public Federal |
| Deke Slayton | Sparta HS, WI (Public) | University of Minnesota | Public State |
Six out of seven: public high schools. Six out of seven: publicly funded higher education. The Space Age was fueled by the Public School Age. Full stop.
The Artemis II crew? Same story. Commander Reid Wiseman — public school. Victor Glover — public school. Christina Koch — public school. The first female launch director, Charlie Blackwell-Thompson — public school. The science director, Kelsey Young — public school. Even Jared Isaacman, who now leads NASA — public school.
You'd think someone in Washington might mention that. You'd think the people currently dismantling public education might pause for a moment and say, "Hm. The schools that produced the people who took us to the moon. Perhaps we should not set those on fire."
You'd think.
Nancy Bailey Asked the Right Question — Nobody's Answering It
My colleague and one of my favorite education truth-tellers, Nancy Bailey, published a piece today that stopped me cold: "America's Students Need Great Public Schools for Science." Read it. Share it. Tattoo it somewhere visible.
Nancy asks the question that should be on every school board agenda, every legislative hearing, every EdTech sales pitch: Who is looking at the science instruction children are actually receiving today?
The answer, increasingly, is: not the people making the decisions.
Here's what's happening in American science classrooms right now, and it is not a drill:
High-stakes testing killed science time. Since No Child Left Behind, reading and math have consumed the curriculum. Science became an afterthought — something you squeeze in between test prep and more test prep. As Education Week's Amanda Townley documented in 2025: "The emphasis on standardized testing has led to a sharp reduction in elementary science instruction." Elementary school is precisely where scientific curiosity is born. We are strangling it in the cradle.
ZIP code determines science quality. A 2021 study titled "Too Poor to Science" found that rural students are systematically denied high-quality STEM instruction. The future of American science is being rationed by real estate values. Deke Slayton grew up in Sparta, Wisconsin — population: small. Gordon Cooper was from Shawnee, Oklahoma. The next Deke Slayton is sitting in a rural classroom right now, and we are failing them.
School choice drains resources and accountability. Tax dollars are flowing to private, charter, parochial, and homeschool settings — with zero consistent accountability for what science is being taught. Some of those schools are excellent. Some teach that the Earth is 6,000 years old. We genuinely don't know the ratio, and that is a problem of civilizational proportions.
Teacher quality is being systematically degraded. Instead of investing in brilliant, certified science teachers who also understand child development, we've opened the revolving door to Teach for America and a parade of well-meaning but undertrained alternatives. You wouldn't let a six-week volunteer pilot the Enterprise. Why are we doing the equivalent with the children who might build the next one?
The EdTech Hustle: "Trust Us, It's Safe" (Said the People Selling It)
Now we arrive at the part where I put on my most skeptical Ape face.
The current "solution" being sold to school districts across America is AI in the classroom — adaptive learning platforms, automated grading, AI tutors, personalized learning dashboards. All of it privately owned. All of it data-hungry. All of it optimized for engagement metrics, not for the moment a kid's eyes go wide because they just understood how a rocket works.
Here's the conflict of interest hiding in plain sight: the people telling you AI is safe in schools are the people selling the AI.
This is not complicated. This is the tobacco playbook with a better user interface.
We watched social media get deployed in schools and on phones before anyone seriously studied what it does to developing brains. We now have a generation of kids navigating anxiety, depression, and fractured attention spans — and the researchers who warned us were ignored because the product was already profitable. Now the same architecture of "deploy first, study never" is being applied to AI in classrooms.
Stanford's Antero Garcia put it plainly: digital platforms "reduce students to quantifiable data," removing "the innovation and imagination of students and teachers in the process." Innovation. Imagination. You know — the things that produce astronauts.
The two-tier system being constructed is not subtle:
- Public schools: AI-delivered instruction, thin on human connection, rich in data harvesting. Your child's curiosity, monetized.
- Private schools: Human teachers, smaller classes, and the quiet confidence that their students' essays aren't training the next product release.
The billionaires funding this transformation did not, as a rule, attend public schools. They are not, as a rule, experts in child development, pedagogy, or the history of education. They are, however, extremely good at identifying a market — and a captive audience of 50 million public school students is one of the largest untapped markets in American history.
We should be listening to Nancy Bailey. To Diane Ravitch. To Paul Thomas. To the researchers, teachers, and child development experts who have spent careers studying what children actually need. Instead, we are listening to the people with the loudest checkbooks and the slickest slide decks.
Christa McAuliffe and the Dream We Almost Forgot
I remember Christa McAuliffe. The Teacher in Space. The woman who made an entire nation believe that the classroom and the cosmos were connected — that the same curiosity that makes a child ask "why does the sky turn orange at sunset?" is the same force that sends human beings beyond the atmosphere.
She was a public school teacher. She taught at a public school. She was chosen because America, at that moment, still understood that public education was the engine of human possibility.
That was before the billionaires decided the engine needed to be privatized, monetized, and run on a subscription model.
The most consequential scientific achievements of the past century — the moon landing, the eradication of polio, the mapping of the human genome, the development of the internet — were built on a foundation of public education, public research, and public investment. This is not nostalgia. This is data.
May Day: The Bill Comes Due
On May 1st, 2026 — six days from now — a coalition of over 200 organizations will stage a national day of action. The demand is three words: Workers Over Billionaires.
Three actions: No Work. No School. No Shopping.
This is not radical. This is arithmetic. You cannot build a scientific civilization while systematically defunding the schools that produce scientists. You cannot claim to care about innovation while turning classrooms into data farms. You cannot worship the astronauts while dismantling the public schools that made them.
Join May Day Strong at maydaystrong.org. Because democracy is not a subscription service. And neither is the future.
One Last Cup
I didn't know, back in 1977, that I was watching history. I thought I was just keeping the coffee hot for some guys who flew planes. I didn't know that Deke Slayton had waited sixteen years for his moment. I didn't know that the quiet engineer at the corner table was helping design the software that would eventually guide a shuttle back from orbit. I didn't know that the whole magnificent enterprise — the rockets, the science, the audacity of it — had been built, person by person, in public school classrooms across small-town America.
I know now.
And I know this: the next generation of people who will boldly go where no one has gone before is sitting in a public school classroom right now. They are curious. They are capable. They are waiting for someone to hand them a beaker, or a telescope, or a question worth chasing.
Don't let anyone sell them a subscription instead.
The Big Education Ape | Cross-posted with love and fury | #MayDayStrong #WorkersOverBillionaires #ProtectStudentData #PublicSchoolsProducedAstronauts #NoKings
Read Nancy Bailey's essential piece: America's Students Need Great Public Schools for Science
May Day 2026 & Organizing
May Day Strong — Official Pledge & Action Hub
Sign the pledge, find local events, and access organizing resources for May 1st, 2026.
NEA — May Day Educator Organizing Toolkit Resources specifically designed for teachers, school staff, and education advocates.
https://www.nea.org
U.S. Senate Switchboard — Demand a Vote on the DISCLOSE Act 📞 (202) 224-3121 — Call your Senator directly.
https://www.senate.gov
U.S. House Switchboard — Demand Co-Sponsorship of H.J. Res. 122 📞 (202) 224-3121 — Call your Representative directly. https://www.congress.gov
