Space design competition sees students shoot for the stars

Imperial is helping to host the UK Space Design Competition, where students compete to design space settlements and win a trip to NASA.

The UK Space Design Competition (UKSDC) exposes groups of students aged twelve and up to their first industrial engineering environment, competing for a fictional contract to design a space settlement. It is championed by Dr Randall Perry from the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial.

The national final is hosted at Imperial at the end of March, where more than 200 students will compete during a two-day celebration of all things astro. After the final, twelve students represent the UK at the International Space Settlement Design Competition at NASA HQ in America.

Before the national final there are a series of regional and video heats, where the groups nominate presidents, vice presidents and marketing teams. Last summer, this included a break-out Space Design challenge at the Imperial Global Summer School.

In the UKSDC the year is 2065, but the competition heats each start early on Saturday mornings 2015. Teams of students meet and are briefed on their specific challenge - for example where the settlement should be, how many residents would be permanent or temporary, and which companies they could subcontract to.

They then spend the day working on designs for their new homes in the sky. The teams design lunar-style names and logos, clever ways to feed their stellar families and innovative spaceship proposals.

Winning formulas

As well as hosting the final, the College has triumphant winners, judges and volunteers amidst its student body. Imperial student and 2014/2015 winner Trisha Saxena is probably the only first-year physicist who has been to NASA before beginning her astrophysics lectures.

The year Saxena competed she was joined by students from Argentina, Canada, America and India, who overcame cultural and language barriers to co-design an international space settlement. Saxena says she found the whole experience extremely rewarding and is now a member of the UKSDC board helping to make decisions about the future running of the competition.

This year, Saxena is joined by fellow physicists Jess Wade and Meriame Berboucha, who all act as chief executive officers for the school teams and judges of the regional round. The CEO position has two roles: to make sure all of the physics is correct and to keep the students smiling.

Berboucha, a third-year undergraduate who runs a science club at her old school, brought her own team to the UK final in March 2015. She says she absolutely loved taking part, and would “encourage all STEM ambassadors to enter a team - not only will your students have a great time but you'll see them grow too!”

Designs for the future

Wade said: “I thought I’d find it very hard not to help the students cheat - it is supposed to be entirely their own efforts - but in fact the students knew way more than I did about growing food in space and protecting against cosmic rays.”

“It’s an amazing competition because it keeps people coming back. The schools had all entered before and most of the students had made the final last year. They don’t look at their phones, they don’t text, and there was no social media - just total concentration. They don’t mind missing half of their weekend.

“I recently spoke to an admissions tutor at Imperial who said that there were plenty of mentions of UKSDC in applications this year.

“Imperial continues to produce some of the world’s best engineering and physics graduates, who aren’t just stuck in lecture theatres learning equations - they are designing the cars, buildings, bridges and space settlements of the future.”