High School Students Mount Global Bid to Design Space Shuttle Pit Stop : Ideas flying across Internet include swank quarters with a juice bar and a language center.

When a U.S. space station is finally built, astronauts might be able to grow rice and corn, live in swank quarters with a juice bar and colorful post-modern furniture and communicate through an international language center. At least that’s the vision of high school students from around the world working on a project spawned by author Gene Meyer, a West Covina industrial engineer, and spearheaded at Don Bosco Technical Institute, an all-male parochial school and junior college in Rosemead.

Thousands of high school students, from Finland to Taiwan to New York, are working via the Internet on the Space Islands Project, a global educational effort to design an orbiting refueling station for the space shuttle made of retooled shuttle fuselages.

Dozens of schools are examining different aspects of life in a cramped space station. Bosco Institute students, working with students from Mission High School, an all-female school in Monterey Park, are trying to build living quarters for 300 residents. They hope to turn a classroom at Bosco into a life-size model.

Meyer said he originally came up with the Space Islands idea as a way to save aerospace jobs in California after he had written a book titled “ET-Solutions: America’s Competitive Secret.” The book describes how the federal government can save money if it stops using the bright orange external tanks, or ETs, for fuel on the shuttle. A better use, he argued, would be to convert them into space stations.

Bosco Institute teacher Peter Romero said the idea of getting students involved took off in September after Meyer contacted him. Romero organized a group of students, and contacted other teachers by e-mail.

The teachers exchange e-mail regularly, and Romero recently held a chat session on America Online with more educators. Meyer also maintains a web site on the World Wide Web containing graphics and details about the project. The web site address is https://www.spaceislands.com/spaceislands/.

More than 300 schools in 38 cities and hundreds more schools around the world are studying the project, said Judy Tashbrook, a spokeswoman for America Online. It is one of the biggest educational projects on the Internet, she said.

In Kansas and Taiwan, teen-agers are studying hydroponics to figure out how to grow food in space. Youths in Finland are designing a universal language center for the crew. New York students are tackling the problem of waste products in space.

The project has even reached into the political arena. U.S. students are starting a petition drive to urge Congress to adopt some of their design ideas. They hope to obtain thousands of signatures and present them to Congress on Jan. 26, two days before the 10th anniversary of the Challenger shuttle tragedy. They want to name the first station after Sharon Christa McAuliffe, the New Hampshire educator who died along with six other crew members.

Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich recently sent Romero a letter saying he wants to visit the school on his next trip West.

Teachers say they believe this project will help educators integrate earth-bound subjects such as math, algebra and even politics, while at the same time piquing the youths’ curiosity in science.

“We want this to be something to hang our hat on and capture a lot of students’ attention,” said Pat Sullivan, a math teacher in De Soto, Kan.

NASA engineer Mark Holderman said many of the students’ ideas are also being pursued by NASA. Holderman said the notion of using the large, bright orange fuel tanks on the shuttle as a space station “is viable today.”

The 45 students at Bosco Institute who are working on Space Islands meet regularly after school to discuss their plans in sessions that sometimes run for hours.

They aren’t concerned if some of their ideas have not been invented yet, such as their plan to have virtual reality games to play in space. “If it’s not invented, it will be in four or five years,” said Steven Ochoa, 17, one of the student project managers.