By Diane Petryk
LEWISBURG — Martin Vollmayr-Lee is not your 1960s’ third-grader.
While he likes Legos and climbing trees and finds his little sister annoying, which wouldn’t differentiate him a bit, he’s not likely to get excited about a space launch from Cape Canaveral. He certainly wouldn’t think it was anything to get dragged out of bed in his pajamas to watch, an experience many Age of Aquarius kids remember.
This week’s space shuttle mission probably will get a shrug of his young shoulders, even with NASA promising three space walks.
He won’t talk about going to the moon because he doesn’t want to go there.
He’s content to live in Lewisburg with his parents, Ben and Katharina Vollmayr-Lee, and his sister, Miriam, 5.
It’s not that Martin, who just turned 9, isn’t interested in science. He’s pretty sure he’s the only one in his class at the Kelly Elementary School who knows about atoms. He loves to discuss electricity — “waves we can’t see or feel” — and magnetism, which can make it, or be made by it.
He goes to Bucknell University’s observatory and talks gravity and black holes with astronomy professor Ned Ladd with the confidence of a graduate student.
“Black holes are just a bunch of stuff stuck together,” he says. “Nothing can escape, not even light.”
On one visit, Martin listens as Ladd tells an open-house audience that we are all the product of stars.
Gravity, Ladd explains, pulls on every object with mass. It’s a great collector. The more stuff, the more attraction. When enough swirling stuff collects, it makes a star. When the interior of the star gets hot enough, fusion takes place. Heat and energy produced by fusion stabilize a star — holds gravity at bay. Maybe for a few billion years, anyway.
Then it gets really hot and explodes, throwing most of its mass back out into space. Eventually, those bits and pieces cool and become just stuff hanging out — molecular clouds — the seeds of the next generation of stars. And sometimes life.
“The fact we all happen to have once been in stars is a neat connection to the universe,” Ladd says.
Martin grasps the vastness of that universe by understanding it in terms of the speed of light.
We measure distances by how long it takes light to get there, Ladd explains. From the sun to the earth — eight minutes. To the nearest star other than our own, four years.
“Space is big, really big,” Ladd adds. “Any random spot in space will be incredibly empty.”
Martin knows we can’t go faster than the speed of light. A kid would hear that kind of thing around the house with two associate professors of physics as parents.
He might become a physicist himself. Or an astronomer, he says. But an astronaut? No way.
“It’s too dangerous. My wife would be home crying. My children wouldn’t be born.”
It would take a year just to fly to Mars.
He knows how dicey it was when Apollo 11’s lunar lander approached the moon’s surface that momentous day in 1969. “They almost ran out of fuel” he said. “The ground showed huge rocks.” “Tranquility Base, the Eagle has landed,” might never have been heard. But the risk paid off.
Adventure, as the new Amelia Earhart movie, “Amelia,” is reminding movie-goers, is synonymous with risk. The aviatrix, as women pilots were called back then, disappeared somewhere over the Pacific Ocean in 1937, but not before knowing how it is to be “alone with the stars” on a night flight.
“Decide,” the real Amelia said, “whether or not the goal is worth the risks. Then stop worrying.”
Space exploration, Martin’s parents have told him, can be done by robots. “We don’t need to send human beings,” his mom told him.
Martin thinks he might consider making a space trip “at a better age — after I’d already done a lot of things. I’d enjoy it. If it was something that could somehow make earth better.”
He knows the earth’s environment needs help. Too many cars are making carbon monoxide poison. He’d like to have the world recycle more and replace old homes and plant more trees.
He’d certainly like to eat a lot more German pancakes. “In Germany, the pancakes are always homemade,” he said. “No matter what, you can’t buy a German pancake anywhere. They’re flat and buttery and you can put Nutella or banana on them. They’re yummy real warm. ...”
Swimming, soccer and gymnastics interest him.
He’d like to read more books like the “Chronicles of Narnia” and “Harry Potter” and stories like those in “Catwings,” by Ursula LeGuin. Books like that take him to other worlds without leaving home.
And who knows? Maybe it will be Miriam who makes it to the Red Planet.
