He had drifted away from the academy, however, and spent most of his career making films, many of them with scientific themes.
Yet Mr Summers turned away from the academy to devote his prodigious brainpower to getting less than you might think done in Washington.
Administrators and teachers had steered them away from the academy "because Michael was such a bright kid," his mother, Shari, said.
A few streets away from the academy, I met a man named Hajji Wang, who was thirty-one when the Shadian incident happened.
The circumstances that led to the Saturday afternoon outing were unclear, but other students said it was uncommon for cadets to go rappelling on their own, especially away from the academy's designated rappelling site.
They could no sooner have acquired a ticket for a World Cup match at Soccer City, less than five miles away, than flown to the moon, and they were far away from the soccer academy set up in a more tourist-friendly part of Soweto by a multinational corporation, but their excitement at mere proximity to the event seemed to have a definite value.
Zaha, then 11, was still a year away from joining the academy.
A meeting last week between Miami police officials and staff members at the American Airlines Arena, where the event was to have been held, ended abruptly after the city did not agree to keep demonstrators far enough away from the arena entrance to suit academy officials.
But she stays away from the region's stuffy Arabic language academies, which are dominated by academics.
"Stephen Twigg has previously said that he wants to take freedoms over the curriculum away from academies," said a government source.
