Imagine being asked to design a habitable space colony, complete with everything from living quarters to robotic support systems.
That's the monumental challenge a group of B.C. high school students will be facing this weekend when they fly down to NASA's Kennedy Space Center for the International Space Settlement Design Competition.
Sahba El-Shawa, an engineer who is joining the team as an adult advisor, said it's an exciting opportunity for the students to compete in an event Canadians have rarely participated in since it began back in the 1980s.
"In the 30-year history of the competition, there have only been two teams that have participated from Canada," El-Shawa said.
The latest team is made up of 23 students from several different Vancouver-area schools, who earned their spot earlier this year in a semi-regional competition. The task from the qualifying round: to devise a settlement capable of cleaning up floating space junk.
"They were to design an orbital habitat for space debris collection, which is becoming more of a problem in the industry," El-Shawa said. "The more stuff you have up there, the more it turns into space junk."
Teams in the competition are split into "companies," each with their own departments that are tasked with handling different aspects of the project. The students do everything from working out construction methods to plotting out the marketing strategy.
"We had to take care of the structure of the settlement, how it's going to run, the operation part of it, how the humans are going to live," said Aden Jabbar, a team member from Princess Margaret Secondary School in Surrey.
"We had to design robots to make the settlement, construct it, and the scheduling, the cost… when it's going to be made, and how many years it's going to take."
There will be NASA engineers on hand during the competition, and Jabbar, who is planning to study engineering after graduation, said the students are hoping to make some networking connections down in Florida that could open doors for their future careers.
They're also hoping to win.
"We have a very solid team in each department," he said. "I feel like we have a lot to bring to the table."
This is the first year Canada has held a semi-regional competition, which guarantees one team of students a spot in the ISSDC. Before that, Canadian students could only hope to qualify by submitting a design proposal, which has to stand out among hundreds if not thousands of entries from around the world.
El-Shawa said she was inspired to organize the semi-regional qualifier after meeting ISSDC co-founder Anita Gale last fall. They scrambled to put a competition together on a tight timeline involving students from 10 B.C. schools, but El-Shawa said they hope to open it up to students from across the country going forward.
But before they start thinking about next year, they have to get through this weekend's competition.
"I do think we have a great shot, based on what I saw at our first competition here," El-Shawa said. "We have some great students who are hard workers, and I think we'll make Canada proud."
To learn more about the competition, visit the ISSDC's website.
