Out of This World: Aurora Art Teacher's Drawing Displayed in the International Space Station

Thad McCauley wanted to be an astronaut when he grew up. Instead, he became an art teacher. But now his art is on display inside the International Space Station, so it kind of worked out.

McCauley describes the feeling of learning he had won the educator category of the International Space Art & Poetry Contest as "pure surprise and joy." His submission, a digital art piece depicting an astronaut riding a rocket-powered board, was one of 2,700 from 35 countries.

The contest, presented by Axiom-2 Pilot John Shoffner and the Perseid Foundation, a STEAM education program created by Shoffner, asked students and educators to imagine what life would look like in space.

McCauley says he found out about the contest through another teacher at Aurora Frontier P-8, where he teaches art, and engaged his fifth and sixth graders in the project. "One of my artists had one where it was an astronaut playing guitar," McCauley says. "Others focused on what structures these astronauts would live inside of for their life in space. We saw a little bit of everything."

The classes voted for their favorites and submitted several of the best pieces to the contest. McCauley was inspired by his students' work and decided to create his own submission.
"I like to draw on the iPad using Procreate," the Centennial resident says."The great thing about it is that you can add so many different layers. Thinking about the astronaut as the foreground, it was so easy to go back in and sprinkle in this galaxy of stars behind it. It has a great feature where you can select a brush to draw beams of light, so I put refracted light off of the astronaut's helmet as kind of a focal point."

McCauley has always had a fascination with outer space. He was born in 1977, the year Star Wars came out. He remembers being fascinated when he saw The Empire Strikes Back as a toddler at a drive-in movie theater near Denver.

"We actually saw the Challenger explode live on TV; that was in second grade, sitting in the library at our school. That's something that sticks in your head."— Thad McCauley

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"NASA had a strong campaign then," he notes. "Kids knew about the astronaut program and I had this vision that I wanted to become an astronaut, like a lot of kids growing up in the '80s. We actually saw the Challenger explode live on TV; that was in second grade, sitting in the library at our school. That's something that sticks in your head."

Where does the rocket board come in? Like any respectable Coloradan who grew up in the '80s, McCauley has always had an interest in skateboarding, too. He even started a skateboarding club at his school. A few years ago, Trails Recreation Center and Arapahoe County funded a project in which McCauley painted 24 murals on the flat surfaces at Trails Skate Park to ward off graffiti.

Spray paint and Procreate aren't McCauley's only mediums. He considers himself a mixed media multi-discipline artist who dabbles in all types of art. "Some things I've been doing recently is found-object art using LEGOs and old cassette tapes and physical media," he says.

McCauley's motto for his students: "Art will not hurt you."

"Just keep making art and trying, because you never know where it's going to take you," he says. "I never thought I'd paint 24 murals at a skate park, and I definitely never thought that my art would be up in outer space. Imagination and creativity got us to space, and now we have astronauts in space and art displayed up there."
McCauley's drawing is currently hanging near a Space Station observation window looking out at Earth, but will eventually be mailed back to him. "I'll get the actual piece of paper that was up in space," he says. "I plan on framing that and putting it up in my art room so I can tell the kids the stories for the next couple years."

Although McCauley and his students submitted their work to the contest about a year ago, McCauley didn't find out he was a winner until last week. McCauley's students were excited that he won the contest, and he says that it turned into a learning experience for some of his younger students, who had never heard of the International Space Station.

"Just to describe that to them was something new," he says. "To learn that there's a place where astronauts live and that it rotates Earth and they're just there for an extended amount of time, and they were into the idea that any country that has a space program is allowed to use it and share it."

While McCauley's students were enthusiastic, maybe the most delighted child was McCauley's inner one. Winning the contest made him think that some of the dreams you have as a kid have an interesting way of presenting themselves later in life, he notes.

"You're young and think you could go on to become an astronaut," he says. "I went on and became an art teacher and an artist, and it's really fun to think that my art's up there for the astronauts to enjoy."

Find out more about McCauley's art here.