Updated: Odenton Man in Top 5 of 'Space Race'

On March 1, we profiled Odenton resident Savan Becker and his attempt to win a trip on a suborbital spacecraft. At the time, he was in 6th place out of thousands of applicants. However, he needed to get into the top five to qualify for a final competition to decide the winner.

Since then, Becker has moved into 4th place, with the final vote closing on March 18.

Readers can vote for Becker's entry at the Space Race website.

Here's the original article about the contest from March 1.

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When Savan Becker was a boy growing up around the bright lights of New York City, he was lucky if he could see a handful of stars and maybe a planet or two in the night sky.

And yet, he developed a burning love for outer space and always set a goal of traveling beyond the Earth.

Becker’s dream may come true, as he is a finalist to ride in a space vehicle more than 60 miles above the planet. He has until March 18 to collect votes via Facebook that would vault him away from the the Earth’s gravitational pull.

“When I look back on it, I think I was 3 or 4 years old and my parents pointed to the TV screen, and there was a rocket launch,” he said. “Growing up, it was nothing but space and space science.”

Becker, an Odenton resident who works at Fort Meade, is one of 20 people in the running to win the Seattle Space Needle's Space Race 2012 Contest. The grand prize is a trip in a suborbital spaceship 62 miles above the Earth. The winner will experience a period of weightlessness, not to mention an awfully nice view of the planet from above. 

Thousands of people entered the Space Race contest by submitting a short video explaining why they were deserving of a suborbital space ride. Organizers then chose 20 finalists, who now must collect votes via Facebook. The entries with the top five votes head to Seattle for a series of unspecified challenges to decide the grand-prize winner.

Becker is now in sixth place in the Facebook voting and has been sending out frequent emails to his friends and family encouraging them to vote frequently.

A suborbital space flight like the one Becker is competing for normally costs about $110,000.

In Becker’s video, he speaks about his love of space as a young boy and his desire to inject that same love to his two young sons, Tristan and Kiran.

“It’s always been my mission to impart my kids with a spirit of exploration and adventure,” he said in an interview. “I think if I don’t get to space, they will.”

It helps that Becker’s education and professional life have been space-oriented all along. He studied physics and space operations as both and undergraduate and in graduate school, then moved into a career in space operations with the U.S. Air Force. He now works at Fort Meade as a Department of Defense contractor, but is also an officer in the Air Force Reserve.

If anything, Becker, 40, said he hoped the Space Race competition would bring some new attention to space travel. He took his boys last year to see the final launch of the NASA space shuttle from Cape Canaveral, FL, last year, and it is unclear when astronauts will resume frequent trips to outer space.

“I would like to see a focus on a goal, whether it be the moon, asteroids, Mars … something to give us focus as a country and a planet,” he said. “I think commercial space flights like this one might be what it takes to re-energize that interest.”

Check out the Seattle Space Needle web page for more information on the Space Race 2012 contest.

Becker’s entry is available for voting through March 18.