Four students from Hanna Early College High School have qualified to be part of a team representing the United States in a global competition to develop an international space settlement.
The International Space Settlement Design Competition takes place July 30-Aug. 2 at the NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It is a high-stakes competition to present the best design specific 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 four students were among 20 from Hanna who competed in the East Coast Space Settlement Design Contest in April to qualify for the international event, Gonzalez said. The students are raising funds to finance their trip through GoFundMe.
Gonzalez said the competition “puts the students into 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 or an asteroid,” and present the plan in a non-stop march to the submission deadline.
“These students put in many hours of extreme hard work with little or no sleep over the last 24 hours of the competition,” Gonzalez wrote in a letter explaining the project. “They were recognized and chosen for their dedication, persistence, leadership, experience, speaking skills and hard work.”
Clarissa Montiel, one of the four qualifying students, described the East Coast competition in April as “a really fun experience where we made new friends from across the United States working together non-stop for 24 hours and just having a lot of fun. It was just unforgettable,” she said, adding that she and her peers are greatly looking forward to the four-day, 48-hour competition in July.
The other qualifying students are Adrian Jasso, Xavier A. Gonzalez and Halil Hamscho.
While the East Coast design contest in April was virtual, the competition in Florida will be live. The organization’s founders are retired NASA engineers and the competition itself will take place on the Kennedy Space Center’s design floor, 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.
“It’s a unique opportunity for them. There isn’t anything else like it,” he said. The competition “simulates for high school students around the world, the experience of working in a company organization to develop a proposal to a specific customer’s RFP in a given “future history” over a single weekend and presenting to a panel of expert judges, he said in a post at spaceset.com.
Cheuvfont also said the competition is a great opportunity for participants to meet working professionals in the aerospace industry.
Anita Gale, a retired NASA engineer, CEO of the National Space Society, an advocacy organization for space exploration, and a co-founder of the ISSDC, characterized the competition as an exercise in “writing the future history of space exploration” by humans.
Gale, who helped engineer the cargo bay on the original space shuttle, helps write the RFPs that are presented to contestants on the Saturday afternoon of the competition to be completed within 48 hours.
Predictions about space exploration are “just on the verge of happening,” she said.
One of the Brownsville contestants, Xavier A. Gonzalez, the engineering teacher’s son and who Gale recommended for the competition said the RFPs can include anything from making a space station to a human settlement on one of Jupiter or Saturn’s moons.
The RFPs are extremely realistic and can be for anything from eliminating dust in the atmosphere to providing entertainment for the inhabitants. They require accurate responses and realistic proposals, for example low-gravity golf, he said.
William Brown of San Benito, who participated in the ISSDC in 2018 and the International Space Development Conference the same year in Los Angeles, said the Brownsville chapter of the National Space Society recently received its non-profit charter. The organization is planning inaugural events in July, he said. The NSS is the sponsoring organization for the International Space Settlement Competition.
Hannah Rens, another ISSDC alum, said the competition helped pave the way for her first job after graduating from the University of Texas at Austin. She’s now working as an engineer for the Boeing company in San Antonio.
“At the competition, you’re not treated like a high school student,” she said. “You’re treated like a capable adult and it gives kids an idea of what working in the engineering field is like,” she said.
Her trajectory from Iowa to UT-Austin to Boeing engineer in San Antonio is one that Montiel can already see playing out for herself.
“It’s crazy to think about because I’m only in high school,” Montiel said. “But I’m seeing my future right before my eyes. I love this stuff. It’s so fun, it’s just amazing to be a part of it.”
