Lafayette Space Fest lands at Lafayette College in October.
By: Kelly Huth
Model rockets,14-feet tall. An inflatable planetarium. Solar system exploration and scale walking tour across the Quad. These are just a few of the highlights to explore when Lehigh Valley Space Fest touches down at Lafayette College.
The family-friendly festival will be held Oct. 12-13, and will have activities and presentations for all ages. Marty McGuire, co-founder of Lehigh Valley Space Fest, says in its first year at Paxinosa Elementary the event garnered a crowd of about 3,000—and he and his co-founder Todd Sullivan knew they needed a larger location for year two.
“By some miracle, we got connected with Lafayette, and the support has just been fantastic—we couldn’t have dreamt of a better location,” McGuire says. “We are thankful for the support from the City of Easton, the College, and Northampton County, and grateful that they saw where we could go with this.”
Chelsea Morrese, executive director of community engagement and director of Landis Center, is excited that Lafayette was able to host Space Fest this year.
“Space Fest brings community together in intellectual, creative, and recreational exploration, which are values that are also critical to the mission of Lafayette,” Morrese says. “It feels like a natural fit, and we are grateful and excited to partner with Todd and Marty to share Space Fest with the Lehigh Valley.
McGuire says the 2024 event will feature presentations by Joshua Pepper, a program scientist for NASA’s Astrophysics Division; Kim Gostelow, whose engineering know-how contributed to the software design process that aided the entry, descent, and landing software for the Mars rovers; Scott Mest, senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute; and many more.
Both McGuire and Sullivan are volunteer solar system ambassadors for NASA, among a cohort across the country who apply for the program to share their love of space exploration. McGuire joined the NASA ambassador program in 2017, and hosts programs at local libraries and events. A marketing director by day, he shares astronomy lessons in his free time on social media (@BackyardAstronomyGuy), and is excited to encourage others to explore all things space at Space Fest.
“Even if you don’t know anything about space, and you’re just curious, you’ll have a lot to experience at Space Fest,” McGuire says.
Throughout the weekend, visitors will be able to attend presentations and check out exhibit tables spread throughout RISC and Hugel, walk a scale model of the solar system on the Quad, learn about the history of the solar system, watch a Star Trek-themed magic show, and learn about the night sky.
Caleb Gallemore, associate professor at Lafayette, will present “Watching the Earth from Space: A Half-Century of Remote Sensing.” He’ll discuss the history of using satellites to map and monitor land cover.
“I’ll be particularly focusing on how the relatively recent convergence of open(ish) cloud computing, machine learning, and increasingly high resolution and frequent imagery are transforming the kinds of research folks are able to do in a whole range of fields,” Gallemore says. “I’ve been very lucky to benefit from openly available satellite data in my own research, and I thought this would be a great opportunity to sort of publicly thank NASA, NOAA, the USGS, the European Space Agency, and all the other organizations whose work makes these sorts of things possible.”
Gallemore says he’s also really excited to see the other talks at the event and experience Space Fest.
McGuire notes that if weather cooperates, they’ll set up several specialized telescopes in Anderson Courtyard so guests can safely view the sun, solar flares, and sunspots. There will also be an Astronomy merit badge session for Boy Scouts 11 a.m. to noon, both days.
“I think it’s going to really thrill people, get them to think about things they never considered before when they hear from our pros at Space Fest,” McGuire says.
