BUCKHANNON – To boldly go.
SpaceTrek, the program that encourages interstellar careers for girls and young women across Appalachia, is getting ready to gather for a second summer in West Virginia.
The 2026 edition launches Sunday on the campus of West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buckhannon and runs through July 25.
Jen Carter was a science teacher at Rowan County High School in rural Kentucky when she first started envisioning the lesson plans, lab experiments and field work that would make up what would become SpaceTrek in 2012.
Before that, the Kentucky native spent a lot of time looking up at the night sky with her dad.
Amid the expanses of bluegrass and limestone-banked hills, Carter would gaze through the eyepiece of a hobby store telescope while her father held forth on the heavens.
The swirl of solar systems.
The planets.
The possibilities.
Interstellar entities light years away and right next door, cosmically speaking.
And it all steered her to STEM – science, technology, engineering and math — the components and pursuits of which that would shape her career.
“I was fascinated,” said Carter, who is now director of the Center for STEM+eXcellence at Morehead State University in Kentucky, SpaceTrek’s home. “I still am.”
SpaceTrek’s West Virginia effort is made possible with a partnership between Morehead State and TMC Technologies, the Fairmont tech firm that played a key role in this past April’s Artemis mission.
Artemis took a crew in orbit around the dark side of the moon in what NASA hopes will be the opening act to an eventual manned mission to Mars. TMC did extensive work on flight simulators and other digital infrastructure that made it all go.
Space Trek, meanwhile, aims to put some impressionable intellects in orbit along the way — for Artemis and other explorations.
Roger that, said Jeff Edgell, TMC’s president and CEO.
“SpaceTrek reflects our focus on developing the right people, equipped with the right skills at the right time, to support the evolving needs of the aerospace and technology sectors,” he said.
The big mission for last summer’s inaugural SpaceTrek camp at West Virginia University involved the launching of mini satellites, which students built and sent soaring hundreds of feet up attached to weather balloons, while transmitting data to computer stations down below.
A total of 24 students from across West Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Ohio are in this year’s SpaceTrek class, including three from Monongalia County: Ava Costello, of South Middle School; Jadyn Hose, of Morgantown High School; and Maria Lehki, of University High.
