Tag Archives: NASA’s

First Canadian student team (Surrey’s Princess Margaret Secondary) wins NASA’s global space competition

Third time lucky for Sumit (Bhupinder) Rathore, a third-year Simon Fraser University computer-engineering student,  and Joe Sihota, physics teacher, who both coached a team of students from Princess Margaret Secondary school on to a win at the annual International Space Settlement Design Competition (ISSDC) at NASA’s (US National Aeronautics and Space Administration) Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas.  From the Aug. 19, 2013 Simon Fraser University news release,

Grumbo Aerospace, the winning team of the annual International Space Settlement Design Competition (ISSDC) at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas, is the first such team to include Canadian high school students. [emphases mine]

Thanks to the tutelage of Rathore and physics teacher Joe Sihota, 10 Princess Margaret Secondary School students in Surrey became the first Canadian semi-finalists to make it to the competition’s invitation-only final.

ISSDC organizers, who are allied with NASA, the Boeing Company and the aerospace industry, invited student teams from 20 schools worldwide to the final.

Finalists, who had submitted winning semi-final designs for a space colony, then formed four new teams that were given company names. The companies competed for the final prize — a trophy, gold medals and a coveted list of résumé references consisting of NASA astronauts and aerospace engineers.

The competition is organized so that teams of high school students apply and if the team is successful and win a berth to NASA, it is, once arrived in Texas, broken apart and new teams formed for the final competition. Here’s a better explanation from my July 3, 2013 posting where the team was raising $10,000 for airfares and accommodation,

The competition invites high school students who are mentored by teachers (and in this case, Rathore, a student) to design a space colony for 10,000-plus people according to set specifications.

Student teams submit 40-page, on-line entries, which are assessed by aerospace industry engineers and managers allied with the contest’s sponsors, including NASA and the Boeing Company.

ISSDC organizers select eight teams as finalists that compete in a live competition to design another colony at the NASA centre. Four more teams, deemed to have submitted stellar first-round entries, are also invited to witness the final competition.

The competing teams are broken up to create new teams comprised of students from different countries, who are coached by a mentor attached to one of the original teams.

The new teams engage in 43 hours of non-stop research to design their final space colonial submissions, which are assessed by ISSDC organizers and NASA astronauts and space engineers.

The Internet is out of bounds as a source of information for the final teams. They must rely on their mentors, NASA’s library and a panel of astronauts and aerospace engineers as resources to design and present their colonies.

The winning team takes home an Oscar-type trophy embedded with a genuine meteorite and an impressive list of NASA astronauts and aerospace engineers as résumé references.

This is the third time that Rathore and Sihota have coached a team of students to the semi-finals and it is the first time Princess Margaret students have won the top prize. More from the news release,

As members of the Grumbo Aerospace company/team, the Surrey students won the approval of the nine aerospace engineers and retired astronauts judging the four final teams’ designs for a 10,000-plus, person-settlement on Earth’s moon.

Rathore, along with Jack Bacon, a pioneering space-technology engineer dubbed the next Carl Sagan, helped coach Grumbo Aerospace to its final victory. Previously recognized by NASA as a gifted teacher, Rathore credits competition seasoning, time management and his personal passion for lunar life with transforming his Surrey protégés into third-time-lucky victors.

“This year I was fortunate enough to have some of the old members returning from my last year’s team,” notes Rathore. “They were very familiar with the stress and unexpected challenges of the final. They were more mentally prepared for the time management required to make on-the-fly creative decisions about the final settlement’s design.

“’The location of the final settlement design on the Earth’s moon worked in our favour. As a huge fan of the moon, I was familiar with most of its settlement design-challenges. I supplied our team with a lot of research to help design requested commercial and industrial ventures, such as a manufacturing base and a tourism centre.”

In citing Grumbo Aerospace as the winning team, the judges praised its attention to detail and creativity in including elements such as hiking and wedding opportunities and self-repairing exterior structures.

The team’s manufacturing base produced computer components, orbital-computing installations, spacesuits and spaceship modules. It included a processing unit to convert lunar raw ore into finished products for use in space-based construction.

The team’s tourism base featured a hotel with earthly and lunar views, special vehicles for tourism travel to all the Apollo landing sites, a spacesuit for tourists and many tourism-oriented lunar-based activities.

Congratulations!