Aiming for the stars
Students of Little Flower High School won the Asian-level space settlement design contest by designing a settlement on Mercury.
A group of students from Hyderabad wooed NASA by winning the recent Asian-level space settlement design competition. The youngest team of the contest, 12 students from Little Flower High School, designed a settlement on Planet Mercury and won the competition along with the Beijing National Day School, China. The teams will now head to Kennedy Space Center, Florida, for the international round of the contest.
The team had 24 hours to design the settlement. Team captain, 15-year-old Kaushik Reddy, says, “Since Mercury is closer to the Sun, we had to work on radiation shielding. We were given a few clues about the project, but the final details were revealed just 24 hours prior to the competition. For instance, when they told us that the planet needs electricity, we had to find the best source and implement it in our design. An estimated cost of the settlement came up to $560 billion, and we suggested that it could be built in eight years. We were asked to build a simulation for the year 2087, so we had to think of the advance technology that could be available during that time.” The competition was spread across a week, and the participants attended workshops and seminars with officials from NASA. 15-year-old Sadhvik Reddy, a class X student, says, “There were teams from across Asia — it served as a platform to expand our knowledge. For the qualifying round, we were given a request for proposal at the beginning of September and had around two-and-a-half months to send our proposal. We then delegated work across different departments — the structure, operation, human factor and automation.”
14-year-old M. Navya, a student of Class IX, adds, “On Mercury, because of extreme conditions, we had to build the settlement on the terminator. It needs to have residential, industrial and agricultural sectors. My role revolved around ideas to provide people with food, water, electricity and to plan solid waste management. We suggested that water could be extracted from the poles of Mercury, since it has ice deposits. For electricity, we suggested solar power sattelite.”
Under the guidance of their advisor M.S. Sashikala, a computer science teacher at the school, the team has started preparing for the next round. “We are now thinking of ideas for different requirements like how to source oxygen when the atmospheric conditions don’t support life, among others,” adds Navya.