Winter Park power couple Marc and Sharon Hagle already flew to space with Blue Origin. They’re set for a return flight soon and want to corral some student journalists to cover the story.

It’s part of a contest from the Winter Park-based national nonprofit SpaceKids Global that Sharon Hagle founded in 2015. It aims to stoke interest in the space industry among elementary-school children, focusing on STEAM education, which is science, technology, engineering, art and math.

“I think this is a great opportunity for the kids to really learn,” she said. “What occupations we have here, we need up there, including space reporters.”

The National SpaceKids Press Squad Competition will award eight children ages 8 to 12 and one parent or guardian a two-day, all-expenses paid trip to the Space Coast. There they will be able to do something most professional journalists have yet to do, tour Blue Origin’s Merritt Island rocket factory, home to the New Glenn rocket Jeff Bezos has said will have its first launch attempt from Cape Canaveral later this year.

The winners will also visit the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, including its new Gateway attraction tied to commercial space endeavors. It’s home to a New Shepard simulator that opened last December.

And the contest also promised training “from a real-life reporter,” to give them TV journalism lessons. With those skills, the “Press Squad” will interview Blue Origin engineers, spacecraft designers and managers about their careers.

“We hope that their local communities will pick up the story, and just spread the word across the country that space is for everyone,” Sharon Hagle said. “What we’re trying to do at SpaceKids Global is bring the possibilities of space to kids everywhere, and we want to make learning fun again, and this is a great example of how to do it.”

If the stars align, they also will interview and watch the Hagles on their return flight to space on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket. The Hagles would launch from Texas, and the contest winners would be covering the launch remotely from Blue Origin’s Rocket Park complex in Florida.

“They’re at mission control. They’ll have a live feed. They’ll be able to see everything,” she said. “They’ll actually be sitting at one of the monitors, and they’ll have their press reporter credentials on. So I mean, we’re gonna make this really special for them.”

The Hagles were on the fourth crewed New Shepard flight on March 31, 2022, for a quick suborbital trip to space, paying Blue Origin an undisclosed amount of money. Marc Hagle is president and CEO of commercial property company Tricor International Corp. The couple live in Winter Park and have a philanthropic hand in several Orlando-area ventures.

Winter Park couple finally makes it to space on Blue Origin flight

Their trip, which featured a weightless kiss, was the culmination of the married couple’s dreams to go to space started when Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic began corralling customers for its own space venture. The Hagles were among the first to buy prospective tickets back in 2007.

“Our good friend Richard Branson, his quote struck home. It really resonated with me, and he always says, ‘If your dreams don’t scare you, they’re too small,” Sharon said.

The Hagles have yet to fly on Virgin but are still in line. Sharon said she would also love to fly on SpaceX one day.

“If there’s really a Santa, we could go on SpaceX and do a three- to five-day orbit around the planet,” she said. “With that mission comes a lot of responsibility, because Marc and I would both like to do research experiments while we’re up there and have that opportunity.”

It feeds into her altruistic desire to give back and spark interest in the youngest students.

“So not only are we contributing to the future, in the scientific manner, but also sharing our stories to get the next generation of space travelers excited about their futures,” she said. “We’ve got to get them engaged, or they’re going to be left behind.”

It’s why she decided to start SpaceKids Global after listening to a guest speaker at Rollins College, physicist Michio Kaku, more than a decade ago.

“He was brilliant, and he talked where everybody could understand. And his message was, if you don’t have kids hooked on math and science by 6 and 7, you’re going to lose them,” she said. “And with that message, it was just time to start to do something.”

She noted that the space industry will need many kinds of people in a future space economy.

“We know that space is for everyone, and that everything that we have here on Earth, we’re going to need off-planet,” she said.

No launch date has been set for the Hagles’ Blue Origin launch, but it will be some time after the contest winners are chosen on Aug. 2.

The contest, run in collaboration with Blue Origin’s nonprofit Club for the Future, was launched on May 3, National Space Day.

One winner each will come from an active-duty military family, an active-duty first responder family, and a member of a Boys & Girls Club, and five others from across the United States.

Parents and guardians can enter their children until June 14 at the nonprofit’s website at www.spacekids.global.