Alex DeBirk, a physics teacher at American Heritage School in American Fork, is also the director of the school's Discovery Space Center. The DSC has two starship simulators, the Discovery and the Galileo. For you old-timers, it is the Galileo that sat in Central School's cafeteria for several years before the school was demolished.
I haven't been able to get to the Discovery Space Center for a long time, so I asked Alex to send a summary of the program. Alex sent the following.
Discovery Space Center News. September 2026
- Our program is chugging along, starting its 5th season flying for 5th through 8th grades here at the school.
- This year, I have assembled an "Advanced Space Simulation" class with my top 8 staff members, with the goal of making the center fully open to private bookings, not just our own.
- Our crack team is moving ahead with building new controls for the modern age and has made significant progress.
- Our set is growing. The Galileo is fully functional and new missions are in the works. We also have an engineering tunnel, very similar to the old Odyssey, in the works, and a vaunted Space Window, something we've always wanted.
- My after-school club is doing well at around 15- 20 members. One of our recent features came from student requests for a galaxy map to base stories on. Well, our Farpoint Map is based on real stars, and that's hard to view in 2D, so I went ahead and made a 3D interactive map that includes all stars within 25 LY, reasonable stars out to 150 LY, and all naked-eye visible stars out to 400 LY.
The Galileo's Interior at the Discovery Space Center
This has made a great map of ~7000 stars (all real, and where known exoplanets occur, those are also included). We have included Farpoint information, too, like House affiliation (only Earth and Mars so far; Cardilir, Tinarrah, etc. are coming). This map has lots of features to look at all stars, a local neighborhood around a star, certain classes, or just habitable stars. Double-click or search for a star to zoom in on it and view only its local mode within a specified radius. Check it out here:
Alex Debirk
The Farpoint Universe Star Map
The Farpoint Universe is a collaborative effort by me and several people, including Bracken Funk and Alex Debirk. This unique universe provides the thematic and structural basis for missions told at The Discovery Space Center at The Space Place at Renaissance Academy.
The star map Alex created is awesome. I just had to add my thoughts on its introduction to the general Space EdVenturing community.
Thanks, Alex, for doing this. Please check it out by clicking on the link above and have some fun with the controls.
Victor
Imaginarium Theater
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