ONTARIO, Calif. — A new Aviation and Space Pathways program has been launched for high school students at Ontario International Airport.
She's only in high school, but Jahnvi Shah already knows programming that can move a Mars rover from Earth.
"I was trying to make it go in an arc," Shah pointed.
She said she was ecstatic to enroll in this Aviation and Space Pathways program at Ontario Airport, teaching students in the Fontana and Chaffey Joint Union High school districts about engineering, science and human exploration in space.
She's about halfway through the 10-week program and already sounds like a NASA astronaut.
"Sometimes on Mars, a robot... to send a command to NASA on Earth, would take 20 minutes. And that's too long," Shah explained. "So if you wanted it to simply make a 90-degree rotation, there's no point in waiting 20 minutes. So things like this can be way easier."
The program teaches students to design a pathway on Mars with a computer and program the robot to follow a sequence of commands.
"Blue, green, red, so that makes it go faster," she said.
The founder of this program, Robert Barboza, said he's building what he calls "Tiger Teams" of junior astronauts, engineers and scientists to solve the problems of the future.
"We have a climate problem. We know we have a coronavirus problem and all kinds of problems like that," Barboza explained. "So by working with Tiger Teams like this, what you're really working on is putting on the best and the brightest people to solve problems," Barboza explained.
But this is just one prong of the program. In the next room over, Captain Willie Daniels showed another class of students in Shades of Blue, an aviation and pilot training.
After flying for United Airlines for 40 years, the retired pilot shows the 9,700 flights in a single day across the U.S., saying he's concerned about a severe projected shortage of pilots and flight attendants over the next two decades.
"Our whole purpose was to be able to mentor and guide the students because, as I indicated earlier, I wanted to be an astronaut, there was not a role model I could follow," Daniels explained.
Daniels said he didn't have much guidance on his journey to become a pilot either, and as one of five Black students in his class of about 600, he vowed that one day, he'd help the next generation connect to the resources they'd need to fill his shoes.
After this training, Shah aims for even higher altitudes and feels like it's possible now.
"I take it, kind of a responsibility and achievement at the same time, being a small percentage of girls that are interested in even a type of engineering," she said.
This program is free for students. It's paid for by a grant from the Chaffey Joint Union High School District, the Fontana Unified School District and the Ontario International Airport.