When the space shuttle Atlantis lifts off for its last mission today, it will carry an 8-ounce payload of glass beads from the Tucson-based charity Beads of Courage.
Beads of Courage uses art therapy to aid young people with serious illnesses in their battles with disease.
"We use art to promote expression, to help children engage more fully with everything they are going through," said Jean Baruch, who founded the organization at a single hospital in 2004 as part of her doctoral research in nursing.
Beads of Courage now has programs at more than 70 children's hospitals in the United States, New Zealand and Japan.
Children in the programs are given beads signifying each step of their treatment, which they string together as a record of their progress. Red beads signify transfusions, for example, and white beads commemorate a chemotherapy treatment.
Each child also receives a handcrafted art bead, donated by glass artists.
Beads of Courage also offers programs for families of the patients and the health-care workers who treat them.
The idea to fly beads into space came from Jamie Newton, an employee of a contractor at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
Newton's daughter, Sydney, 6, has received more than 450 beads during her cancer treatments at a Birmingham, Ala., hospital, according to a NASA news release.
Baruch said the organization held a contest among the glass artists in the program for space-themed beads, and 17 were selected for the flight.
She hopes to exhibit the beads, upon their return from space, at the Pima Air and Space Museum in Tucson. They will then be sent on a tour of the hospitals in the program.
Glass artists are also making replicas of the design that will be given to children in the program.
Baruch spoke by telephone from Cape Canaveral, Fla., where she and the Newtons are honored guests at today's launch.
The shuttle, carrying supplies to the International Space Station, is scheduled to launch at 11:20 a.m. Tucson time.
Contact reporter Tom Beal at 573-4158 or tbeal@azstarnet.com
