Students to compete in space settlement design contest

Four students from Hanna Early College High School, including two contest veterans, have qualified to compete to represent the United States in a global competition to design an international space settlement.

The International Space Settlement Design Competition takes place in late July at the NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It is a high-stakes competition to present the best design-specific response to a request for proposal, or RFP, from a customer to develop such a settlement, said Xavier H. Gonzalez, an engineering teacher at Hanna and volunteer in the organization that presents the competition.

The students are raising funds to finance their trip through a GoFundMe page at https://gofund.me/58cf5c91.

The competition places students in a real-world example of what it’s like to work as an engineer in the aerospace field. It is an extremely rigorous competition requiring students to do research and development of a space settlement such as on Mars, another planet or an asteroid, Gonzalez said.

David Cheuvront, a retired Johnson Space Center engineer who has served as CEO for several of the mythical aerospace companies in the ISSDC and as a judge for the competition, has said the competition is a great opportunity for participants to meet working professionals in the aerospace industry.

Hanna team members include Mayra A. Saavedra, Xavier A. Gonzalez, Clarissa Montiel and Angelo Modesto. Gonzalez and Montiel participated last year.

Montiel characterized the competition as very stressful but said it provides a lot of experience.” You get to learn new things about the field you want to be in, you get to meet people and you get to make connections,” she said.

In last year’s competition, team members designed an underground tunnel network on Mars. The project finished second.

“There will be four to five teams from all over the country, 15 members max per team,” Gonzalez said. “The competition takes place and then there’s a winning team and from that winning team 12 members will be chosen to represent the U.S. at worlds.”

Gonzalez added that Javier A. Gonzalez, his son, and Montiel were asked after last year’s competition to present at professional aerospace conferences including the Foundation for Future conference and National Space Society conference.

“From these competitions I’ve learned to speak in public and to lead,” Montiel said. “Before this I really didn’t like to go out there, but at worlds I led like a 20-person team and a department within an 80 person team. … It’s just crazy to think that a year ago I wouldn’t have imagined doing that, but because of these competitions I can see myself eventually going into their shoes, going higher up in STEM and engineering.”

In the East Coast Space Settlement Design Contest in April, a qualifier for Florida, students designed a settlement orbiting Mercury.

“You have to take into account everything you need to live on something floating in space or on an actual planet, on this one a space settlement revolving around Mercury,” Angelo Modesto, a sophomore on the team, said. “Food water, and if you miss something it’s devastating because you get killed.”

Montiel added, “a little mistake can make your whole project trash because everyone’s going to die.”

“And its not just drawing it out,” Modesto said. “Me and Javi had to build interior and exterior robots to construct the whole thing.”

Montiel said part of designing a space settlement involves “thinking up ways we can make life easier, and a place where people can live and work day to day.”