Seven secondary school science students from Dublin and Clare have soared to success by beating thousands of global competitors to win a space design competition founded by Nasa.
The girls and boys from St Dominic’s College in Cabra and St Flannan’s College in Ennis won first place in the senior section of America’s National Space Society space settlement contest.
The competition attracted some 26,000 competitors worldwide.
The team designed an innovative orbital habitat, with capacity to support more than 10,000 people, which would also serve as a hub for exploring the moon and solar system.
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The Irish-designed space habitat – called Inis Beatha or “island of life” – would use artificial gravity and hydroponic plants, genetically modified for the harsh space environment, to create a “closed-loop” system capable of recycling the food, water and oxygen required to sustain life in orbit.
Operating free of Earth’s gravity, Inis Beatha could also be used as a base for lunar colonisation and for exploring planets and asteroids beyond Earth’s orbit.
The Irish students have been invited to Orlando, Florida, in June to present their design to the International Space Development Conference, an annual gathering for leaders of the space industry, astronauts, scientists, and space enthusiasts.
With less than three months to go, however, both schools need to raise money if they are to send their students to Florida.
“If they’re going to make it to Florida in June, the fundraising has to start now,” said St Dominic’s College principal Ann Cameron. “We’re hoping the public will come to their help. And we’d be delighted to get business sponsorship. It’s not every day that a business in Cabra or Clare gets to lend its name to space exploration.”
Some of the students have set up a fundraising webpage online in the hope of securing enough funds.
The winning students, meanwhile, said they were thrilled to win the top prize.
“I was really delighted when I heard that we’d won,” said Shreya Mariya Saju, one of the girls from St Dominic’s in Cabra. “I told everyone at home and they were overjoyed.”
The team’s membership – Shreya Mariya Saju and Lexie McKenna from the Cabra girls’ school and Alex Furey, Damian Woros, Najib Haq, Gavin Shiels and Ahmed Ibrahim from the mixed school in Ennis – have interests not only in physics and aeronautics but chemistry and biology as well.
“I really enjoyed working on the project as I got to work on the evolving sector of space exploration,” said Gavin Sheils. “I met new people and have had an amazing experience with this opportunity. I found that working on the concept of a moon base was very interesting as well. I’m really looking forward to the trip to Orlando.”
Lexie McKenna said her part was creating the closed loop system for water, oxygen and food, “because you can’t bring things up from the earth, you have to recycle what you have there, so we use plants to do that”.
Teacher Fiona Dockery said plants grown in space could produce not only food and oxygen but also biofuels, plastics and pharmaceuticals for the inhabitants.
“Inis Beatha could also be used to assemble or even manufacture parts and fuel for spacecraft to explore the solar system. It would be much easier and cheaper to build a spaceship if you were already beyond Earth’s gravity,” she said.
The students were supported by teachers John Conneely, Teresa Considine and Michael Horgan in Ennis, and Adrieanne Healy and Fiona Dockery in Cabra.
