It’s not every day that an
astronaut visits the Cayman Islands.
General Charlie Duke is one of only
12 men in history to have walked on the moon. He was in Grand
Cayman this past weekend as part of the Astronaut Scholarship
Foundation, a group of more than 80 astronauts that provide scholarships to
college students who have shown exceptional performance in science and
engineering.
His schedule was packed: He spoke
to a group of schoolchildren at John A. Cumber Primary on Friday morning, went
scuba diving in the afternoon and attended a charity dinner in the evening. And
that is just one day.
“For the last three or four years,
I’ve been doing a lot of work for the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation,” Mr.
Duke said. “We raise money for the foundation and one of the ways we do that is
to offer our time to go on an adventure; go scuba diving.”
Cruisers
Mr. Duke and his wife Dottie
visited Grand Cayman on a cruise ship several
years ago. He says that they enjoy visiting the Caribbean and Cayman
Islands and the diving here is just spectacular.
Scuba diving is one of the ways
that NASA astronauts trained for space flights.
“We wanted to see what neutral
buoyancy was like,” he said. “So we did a lot of training in a big water tank
in Houston for
emergency transfers between two space crafts.”
Mr. Duke headed out on the diving
excursion that was sponsored by DiveTech Cayman Islands.
A portion of the money raised will
go to a Caymanian scholarship fund, according to Mr. Duke.
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