Help For Science Seekers

What also makes this GAS flight unique is the age of the experimenters in Science Project Help. ''Half our students are under eighth grade. That's never been done,'' said Edmund Burke, technical director for the California projects.

More than 50 companies across the country have donated more than $ 100,000 worth of materials to the participating California Central Coast schools as Science Project Help. The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics raised $ 7,500 to get the experiment going and to help rent the space in the shuttle from NASA.

While the Cathedral School tanks will be only two inches in diameter for the experiment, in real life they would be 14 to 15 feet around and one would cost roughly $ 20 million to launch, says King.

The tanks pump and receive fluids in zero gravity -- a requirement for rocket engines, satellites and space stations. The idea is to design tanks that would act like gas stations in space, loading propellants such as rocket fuel into orbiting spacecraft to send them to places like Mars without losing the propellant in space. ''The biggest problem is there's no such thing as down or up,'' says King.

The receiving tanks are globes that sit still while the liquid spins in zero gravity like water going down a bathtub drain. A jet on the side of the tank forces in the fluid, which is pushed around the sides of the walls.

The question is, says King, how do you operate a gas station in orbit when most of the energy is expended just lifting a vehicle into space? The idea is to be able to refuel the vehicle in space rather than using it just once before sending it back to Earth.

These days, the students are doing things like figuring how to electronically control the pump speed in space. ''We haven't exactly seen the tank since it turned classified,'' says Chris Breakspear, 12, removing his hands from the secret tank on the television screen.

''I have a diagram of it (the secret tank) and so does my dad,'' says Peter Seliga, 9. ''I'm not going to show it to anybody.'' ''I didn't tell my parents,'' said Alston Lew, 11. ''My dad looks at the diagrams but he doesn't know what they mean. . . . I don't know why it's so important.''