Astronaut Jerry Ross can still recall the wide-eyed wonder he felt as a youngster growing up in rural Crown Point at a time when outer space had become the newest frontier to explore.

"I can remember many nights lying on bales of hay and looking out at the stars with my best friend Dr. Jim Gentleman," Ross, 60, said from the Johnson Space Center in Houston where he is Vehicle Integration Test Office Chief.

Like much of the nation, Ross said, "From the beginning, it captivated me." His head was in the stars before the first satellite was launched by Russia in 1957.

"My mother helped me make scrapbooks. All my aunts and uncles knew and saved me their Look and Life magazines," he said, adding that he was in fourth grade when he knew he wanted to go to Purdue University, the school that had graduated the scientists and engineers he admired.

"I played hooky from school to watch John Glenn," Ross said, then told of his senior trip to Daytona Beach with a couple of friends that ended up with a side trip to Cape Canaveral (Kennedy Space Center now) to watch the launch of a target vehicle.

Ross would go on to make history as the first human ever to be launched into space seven times.

In October, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration celebrated its 50th birthday. Ross said he is living his dream, and today's youngsters can do the same. He said NASA has many varied programs aimed at nurturing an interest in space exploration.

"You never know what will light one kid's fire," he said. "They're definitely going back to the moon," Ross said of the next generation of astronauts.

"In the next eight to 10 years, we'll be going back to stay for weeks or months. We'll be building habitats up there."

Science teacher Linda Hogan, 60, hopes she can inspire some of her sixth-grade students at Lake Ridge Middle School in Gary to become the astronauts of tomorrow.

As an impressionable 9-year-old, Hogan remembers the palpable excitement of the 1957 October night when the Russian Sputnik was visible, and everyone gathered outside to witness the light in the sky.

"Everybody, my mom, my dad, me, my brother, all stood out on the porch ... We were excited, and we were afraid," she said, adding that the Cold War tensions of the time left them wondering if it would be used to spy on the United States.

That night signalled the beginning of the race to space and the birth of NASA.

Hogan celebrated NASA's birthday in October by experiencing zero gravity ("Very exciting!") with the Northrop Grumman Flights of Discovery Program in Chicago.

Last year, she attended space camp in Huntsville, Ala.

"I'm trying for advanced space camp next," she said.

"My students get so excited when I tell them that when you look up at the sky and see the stars, each one is a sun and could have its own solar system. The sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders are the ones targeted to be on the shuttle to the moon. The moon will be a jumping-off point."

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand the value of space exploration goes far beyond Tang, Teflon and Velcro, Hogan said, referring to products that were used during or developed for space exploration.

"Exploring where we haven't been explains our past," she said.

Perhaps Ross said it best last spring: "We're doing some very important things that feed the economy of the future of the United States. That's one thing that I always try to point out to people, that the money we're spending on the space program isn't shot into space and distributed to the stars. That money is spent here on the Earth, and it's spent on high-technology development and use," he said.

"You look at the kind of things that are driving our economy right now, and many of them are things that have been either developed from the space program -- or advanced by the space program -- in telecommunications, computers and high technology."