Mars Discovery Center plans presented to council
MARS — Representatives of the Mars Robotics Association presented plans for a borough-wide campus to the council Monday.
In 2019, the borough received a $1 million Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program grant to assist in building the Mars Discovery Center. The center would act as a public Mars and NASA educational facility.
“We’ve talked about doing an alternative type of approach,” said Jeff Beckstead, robotics team president and mentor. “Doing it more as a campus — smaller, with multiple spaces around town.”
Initial plans for the center focused on purchasing the Woodland Valley Church on Crowe Ave. When the church decided to stay, Mayor Gregg Hartung helped re-envision the center as a campus.
“The best feedback was when I talked to Harrisburg about it,” Hartung said. “They loved the idea for a small town, because it actually gets people to go through the town rather than to one location and then leave.”
Mars Robotics Association students drafted plans for the campus in early 2020. Lindsey Gourash, the group’s outreach leader, presented these plans to the council.
“It would serve as an event center, with an outdoor space for parties, festivals and weddings,” Gourash said. “It would also be a visitor center for Mars, with gift shops and information about our town.
Education, though, is the center’s priority.
“It would include classrooms for summer camp and educational events,” Gourash said. “It would also have a community ‘maker space’ so that people in the community could build and make tools, or rather use tools.”
Thanks in part to their Mars New Year festival — a biannual celebration of the planet’s new year — the borough has become a playground for science, technology, engineering, arts and math (STEAM). The robotics association hopes that the discovery center will build on that identity.
“With the Mars New Year festival, we’ve become a center for STEAM and NASA, but that’s once every two years,” Gourash said. “This discovery center would enable Mars to become a STEM and STEAM hotspot for people year-round.”
She also addressed benefits to local businesses. As visitors use the center, she said, the borough’s shops, restaurants and services would see more customers.
According to Hartung, the revised plan for the campus includes three prospective sites in the borough.
“I’ve talked to Ed McCaul from the public library, and they’re thinking about redoing the library on their property: ‘The Library of the Future,’” Hartung said. “Then we would have a third building on the eastern side of town for drones: ‘The Drone Zone.’”
The final proposed campus location is a building on Pittsburgh Street. Once a Methodist church, the building is now being split between the Mars Space Pioneers 4-H STEAM club and the Mars Robotics Association.
“Maybe that’s one of the first places we start,” said Council President Michael Fleming. “Maybe it’s time to transition that space, and if that’s what we’ve got to work with, why don’t we start there?”
The building would become the robotics center as well as an education center for the Mars Space Pioneers 4-H STEAM club.
“The really big thing here is: let’s make this happen,” Beckstead said. “We’ve been talking about this for three to four years now. I’m hoping this is motivation to say, ‘Hey, let’s start to think this through and make this happen.’”
