The NASA Space Settlement Contest is an annual design competition for 6-12th grade students sponsored by the NASA Ames Research Center and the NSS (National Space Society). This contest is open to students ages eleven through eighteen from anywhere in the world. Individuals compete as individuals or as part of a team in two categories, in teams of up to six students, and in teams of seven or more students.
The goal of this contest is to have students learn about science and teamwork while working on projects to develop space settlement designs. Students submit a report about their designs to NASA Ames, and the reports are judged by aerospace professionals. Awards are given for artistic and literary merit.
The contest is divided into five categories for awarding:
Grand Prize: This category consists of one overall winner, whose project is considered as the finest and most creative. Self researched projects are more encouraged.
1st Prize: This category is divided for all grades from 6th to 12th, ages 11 to 18.
2nd Prize: This category is divided for all grades from 6th to 12th, ages 11 to 18.
Ames is a city in Story County, Iowa, United States, located approximately 30 miles (48 km) north of Des Moines in central Iowa. It is best known as the home of Iowa State University (ISU), with leading agriculture, design, engineering, and veterinary medicine colleges. A United States Department of Energy national laboratory, Ames Laboratory, is located on the ISU campus.
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is a federally funded research and development center in the City of La Cañada Flintridge, California, United States. Founded in 1936 by Caltech researchers, the laboratory is now owned and sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and administrated and managed by the California Institute of Technology.
The Ames Research Center (ARC), also known as NASA Ames, is a major NASA research center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1939 as the second National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) laboratory. That agency was dissolved and its assets and personnel transferred to the newly created National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on October 1, 1958. NASA Ames is named in honor of Joseph Sweetman Ames, a physicist and one of the founding members of NACA. At last estimate NASA Ames had over US$3 billion in capital equipment, 2,300 research personnel and a US$860 million annual budget.
The Centennial Challenges are NASA space competition inducement prize contests for non-government-funded technological achievements by American teams.
Mathcounts, stylized as MATHCOUNTS, is a nationwide middle school mathematics competition held in various places in the United States. Its current lead sponsors are Raytheon Technologies and the U.S. Department of Defense STEM.
Topcoder is a crowdsourcing company with an open global community of designers, developers, data scientists, and competitive programmers. Topcoder pays community members for their work on the projects and sells community services to corporate, mid-size, and small-business clients. Topcoder also organizes the annual Topcoder Open tournament and a series of smaller regional events.
The Koç School is a private coeducational school in Turkey founded by Vehbi Koç, one of Turkey's wealthiest businessmen. The school comprises a high school that pioneered the IB program in Turkey and an elementary school. Prospective students gain admission into the high school based on their achievements on the nationwide examination for high schools in Turkey.
The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) was a robotic spacecraft operated by NASA. The mission was conceived as a low-cost means of determining the nature of hydrogen detected at the polar regions of the Moon. Launched immediately after discovery of lunar water by Chandrayaan-1, the main LCROSS mission objective was to further explore the presence of water in the form of ice in a permanently shadowed crater near a lunar polar region. It was successful in confirming water in the southern lunar crater Cabeus.
Maria T. Zuber is an American geophysicist who is the vice president for research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she also holds the position of the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. Zuber has been involved in more than half a dozen NASA planetary missions aimed at mapping the Moon, Mars, Mercury, and several asteroids. She was the principal investigator for the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) Mission, which was managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
National History Day is a non-profit organization in College Park, Maryland that operates an annual project-based contest for students in grades 6-12. It has affiliates in all fifty states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, South Korea, China, South Asia, and Central America. It started as a local program in Cleveland, Ohio, headed by Dr. David Van Tassel, a history professor at Case Western Reserve University. It grew from 129 students in 1974 to over 500,000 students in 48 states in 1991, and 700,000 students and 40,000 teachers in 2001. Today more than half a million students enter through local contests. They construct entries as an individual or a group in one of five categories: Documentary, Exhibit, Paper, Performance, or Website. Students then compete in a series of regional contests with top entries advancing to state/affiliate contests. The top two entries in each category and division are invited to compete at the National Contest.
The American Rocketry Challenge is an annual American model rocketry competition for students in grades six to 12 sponsored by the Aerospace Industries Association and the National Association of Rocketry. Co-sponsors include NASA, United States Department of Defense, the American Association of Physics Teachers and the Civil Air Patrol. Previously known as the "Team America Rocketry Challenge," the name was changed following the 2019 event.
Planetary Transportation Systems (PTS), formerly known as PTScientists and Part-Time Scientists, is a Berlin-based aerospace company. They developed the robotic lunar lander "ALINA" and seek to land on the Moon with it. They became the first German team to officially enter the Google Lunar X-Prize competition on June 24, 2009, but failed to reach the finals in 2017 for lack of a launch contract. During the summer of 2019, the company filed for bankruptcy, and the ALINA project was put on hold. In July 2021, PTS was selected with ArianeGroup to build ESA's ASTRIS kick-stage.
The 100 Year Starship project (100YSS) was a one-year joint U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) effort "to take the first step in the next era of space exploration—a journey between the stars." The study explored development of a viable and sustainable model for persistent, long-term, private-sector investment into the myriad of disciplines needed to make interstellar space travel practicable and feasible. The goal was to examine what it would take — organizationally, technically, sociologically and ethically — to develop the ability to send humans to another star within 100 years. The study culminated in a $500,000 grant awarded to a consortium under the lead of the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence, which led to the creation of an independent organization inheriting the name 100 Year Starship from DARPA. Annual 100YSS symposia were organized from 2011 to 2015, and again in 2023.
The NASA Launch Services Program (LSP) is responsible for procurement of launch services for NASA uncrewed missions and oversight of launch integration and launch preparation activity, providing added quality and mission assurance to meet program objectives. LSP operates under the NASA Space Operations Mission Directorate (SOMD).
Andrew Frank Jorgensen Abercromby is a scientist and biomedical engineer who designs and tests spacesuit systems and exercise countermeasures for future exploration of the Solar System. He is employed by NASA as Lead of the Human Physiology, Performance, Protection & Operations (H-3PO) Laboratory at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. As an aquanaut, Abercromby served as a member of the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations 14 crew. Abercromby has more than fifteen years of experience working in the Human Health and Performance (HH&P) and Engineering Directorates at the Johnson Space Center. He is married with two daughters.
William J. (Bill) Borucki is a space scientist who worked at the NASA Ames Research Center. Upon joining NASA in 1962, Borucki joined the group conducting research on the heat shield for Apollo program spacecraft. He later turned his attention to the optical efficiency of lightning strikes in the atmospheres of planets, investigating the propensity that these lightning strikes could create molecules that would later become the precursors for life. Subsequently, Borucki's attention turned to extrasolar planets and their detection, particularly through the transit method. In light of this work, Borucki was named the principal investigator for NASA's Kepler mission, launched on March 6, 2009 and dedicated to a transit-based search for habitable planets. In 2013, Borucki was awarded the United States National Academy of Sciences's Henry Draper Medal for his work with Kepler. In 2015 he received the Shaw Prize in Astronomy.
The NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge, prior to 2014 referred to as the Great Moonbuggy Race, is an annual competition for high school and college students to design, build, and race human-powered, collapsible vehicles over simulated lunar/Martian terrain. NASA sponsors the competition, first held in 1994, and, since 1996, the U.S. Space & Rocket Center hosts.
PhoneSat is an ongoing NASA project of building nanosatellites using unmodified consumer-grade off-the-shelf smartphones and Arduino platform and launching them into Low Earth Orbit. This project is part of NASA's Small Spacecraft Technology Program and was started in 2009 at NASA Ames Research Center.
NASA International Space Apps Challenge is annual NASA's global hackathon, first held in April 2012, and serves as innovation incubation and civic engagement program. NASA and its partners put out challenges relating to current work for which space enthusiasts around the world of all backgrounds can develop innovative solutions, particularly focusing on use of NASA data and promoting education. The project, formerly run by NASA's Office of the Chief Information Officer, is part of NASA's Earth Science Mission Directorate and is a part of the Open Government Initiative founded under President Barack Obama "creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government." It also fulfills the United States’ commitments to the Open Government Partnership.
Rachel Zimmerman Brachman is a Canadian-born space scientist and inventor. She invented the "Blissymbol Printer" in 1984, making it simple for users with physical disabilities to communicate. A user can choose various Blissymbols to convey his or her thoughts and the printer translates those images to written text. Her invention was recognized worldwide and she has received several awards for her achievements.
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