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Most Utah school districts sell stuff like pencils, T-shirts and bumper stickers.
Only one is selling a spaceship.
"You don't really see a little spaceship simulator on the auction block every day, do you?" said Victor Williamson, director of the Alpine School District's Christa McAuliffe Space Education Center which is housed at Central Elementary School in Pleasant Grove.
Alpine is auctioning off the Galileo Mark 5, a life-size, 12-year-old space ship simulator that seats five, to the highest bidder online. For years, the Star Trek-like shuttle has sat in the cafeteria of Central Elementary, taking students on virtual missions as part of the space education center, which has been a school field trip
But as with all technology, the time has come to replace the Galileo with a newer, shinier version.
As of Thursday afternoon, 10 bids had been placed on the craft, the highest at $1,000, at www.publicsurplus.com. This is the first time the center has ever tried to auction off anything, let alone a spaceship.
David Kyle Herring, the space center volunteer who originally built the ship as a teenager in 1997, said it's "surreal" to see his creation on the auction block. He said he's thought about buying it, but would rather just build himself a new one.
"We like to say on the odometer, it has a few hundred-thousand
Despite Herring's unusual talents, the now 28-year-old communications consultant and political campaign director isn't the type of person one might expect to build a space shuttle.
As a teenager, he wasn't a science fiction fan. He wasn't interested in aerospace engineering.
He wasn't even a Trekkie.
He was just one of the thousands of kids who visited the space center on a field trip and fell in love with it. He became an intern there and decided he wanted to build a realistic simulator for Sunset View Elementary, his own former school in the Provo District.
Herring spent two years raising money for and putting together the Galileo in his grandmother's garage in Provo. It took him five tries to build it.
The Provo district kicked in some money for the project, as did a handful of community businesses.
"They were basically trusting in a then 16-year-old to construct a space center," Herring said. "That was really far fetched. They took a leap of faith."
But their leap paid off. The result of Herring's work was a room-sized simulator featuring several computers from which students could control the craft, and a large screen at the front where they could see stars whirring by.
The spaceship sat at Sunset View for a short time before the space center bought it in 1998 when Sunset View ran out of room.
The center paid $3,500 for it but has since remade that money many times over. Though the center hosts school field trips during the day, it makes money by hosting private parties and camps and through grants and donations.
Williamson said the center hosts about 500 to 600 kids a week in its five spaceship simulators. Students each take on different jobs within the simulators in order to complete missions, most of which are inspired by real historical events.
On a recent day, sixth-graders from Renaissance Academy in Lehi manned the center's Voyager simulator in an effort to free embassy workers and oppressed citizens living under a fascist dictator on the planet New Earth -- a scenario fashioned somewhat after the Iranian hostage crisis and more recent events in Iraq.
In true Star Trek fashion, students commanded the computer, raised and lowered the ship's shields and attempted to communicate with other ships. Student security guards watched over the brig, the captain barked orders from the bridge and others navigated the ship from their computer stations. The scene looked as real as anything from the TV show.
The students agreed that they'd love to take their own ship -- the Galileo -- home.
"All your friends could use it," said sixth-grader and captain Tyson Rupp.
Ship ambassador Savannah Knapp, 11, said the simulator was even better than a video game.
"You get to actually be in it, instead of playing with your hands," Knapp said.
Right wing officer Alex Garrison, 11, said he'd give all his money, "40 bucks," to buy it.
With so many fans, Williamson said he's sure the simulator will find a good home when the auction is up Nov. 30.
Perhaps it will go to a museum or Star Trek club, he said.
Maybe a kid will buy it.
"If mom and dad could stomach it, it would be ideal," he said.
To learn how to bid on the spaceship, go to blogs.sltrib.com/education. To read more about the Christa McAuliffe Space Education Center, visit www.spacecamputah.org/index.php.
