Bowling Green High School student Susan Johnson can’t remember a time when she didn’t
    want to be an astronaut.
    And her plan for becoming one is concrete: obtain her private pilot’s license by age
    17, get a recommendation from a congressman to the Naval Academy, and become a
    fighter pilot in the U.S. Navy.
    "After I do that, I want to apply to become an astronaut and hopefully I have
    good enough qualifications for them to pick me," Johnson said.
    But thanks to a recent NASA conference Johnson attended at Kennedy Space Center, the
    "qualifications" section on her resume got a little more detailed.
    Johnson, a sophomore, attended a three-day conference this summer which afforded her
    the opportunity to be in reaching distance of several space shuttles and enter
    into restricted NASA areas not seen by a majority of the public.
    The 15-year-old was selected to attend the conference based on her participation in a
    year-long NASA INSPIRE online program. She was one of 36 high school students
    from the U.S., Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic to attend.
    "I think it was definitely a very special opportunity. I felt very privileged to
    go because I was able to see things the normal public wouldn’t get to see,"
    Johnson said.
    On her first day at the conference, Johnson and her mother, Laura, a chaperone, got
    to see inside mission control and even participated in a mock launch simulation.

    "You definitely felt important you were sitting there and feeling the pressure
    of what the people go through," Johnson said.
    They also got to see the Mercury launch site and several other launch sites at Cape
    Canaveral. She also got to help build a rocket thrust protector.
    On the second day, "We got to see where they launch the space shuttles and where
    the Apollo site was.
    "It was kind of a sad, but it was cool to see where they launched it,"
    Johnson said.
    She also got to see, up close, the Atlantis space shuttle.
    Day two also included a tour of the Orbiter Processing Facility.
    "That was really cool to go into, because not many people get to go in
    there," Johnson said.
    On the last day, Johnson got to see NASA helicopters and jets and heard from a NASA
    career panel. Among the speakers was the project manager for the Project
    Morpheus, which is seeking to land humans on the moon.
    "It was really cool to talk to him because he is working on the cutting edge of
    NASA," Johnson said.
    Johnson knows her NASA Projects. She even knows the abbreviations for all of NASA’s
    facilities.
    "You have to quickly learn them otherwise you get lost in what they are
    saying," Johnson said.
    Aside from her interest in space, the daughter of Paula and Laura Johnson, is also
    involved in cross country, Model United Nations, ping-pong club, orchestra,
    track, FFA and Venture Crew.

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