The Challenge

You are working for NASA and your job is to design a new space mission to explore somewhere in the Solar System – the Moon, Mars, one of Jupiter’s moons or beyond.

If your school team is selected, you will participate in an international videoconference with students from other schools in New Zealand, Canada and the US using PowerPoint and/or other animation software to support your team’s verbal presentation. Each school team’s presentation will be discussed by a panel of scientists who will be looking for innovative and creative ideas.

This is a Challenge, not a Competition. There are no winners or losers  - it's all about sharing ideas and using real science. You can help shape the future, so start dreaming now.

First you have to use your imagination and dream and then you need to add some reality to your design. When you dream, "the sky is the limit". When you add reality and "come down to Earth", you need to add further considerations to your design:

• Energy
• Scientific merit
• Technology,
• Economic,
• Societal and
• Human factors.

How do you get inspiration for your dream?
Look at what others are doing and planning for inspiration and as a "jumping off" place for your dreams.

• A good start is to watch the NASA CONNECT™ show Rockets to the Stars. Follow this link to the Apple Learning Interchange for QuickTime Player streaming and this link to Knowitall.org for Windows Media Player Streaming
  
  
• Next, we have provided animations of future NASA mission plans on our website for you to get ideas.
  
  
• Click here to view the simulations.

Once you have inspiration, how do you start dreaming?
NASA always works in teams for its missions and you should too - we suggest three team members. Let every member contribute their dreams to a brainstorming meeting and then come up with your group's dream future NASA mission.

Focus:
The focus of the challenge is to design and present your spaceship and its rocket systems. You should present your design in words, as a drawing and include a simulation of the mission.

• You will need to decide where you want to go
• What you want to accomplish when you get there
• The scientific experiments proposed for your mission
• The scientific merit of these experiments
• Whether your mission will be manned or robotic or mixed
• The design of your spaceship(s) and propulsion system(s)
• The number of stages and different types of spaceships required

Once your team has completed the focus of their challenge, each member should work on the different aspects of adding energy, economic, scientific merit, human factors and technology considerations to your design.

Deliverables:
A PowerPoint presentation (go to our PowerPoint Tips for help preparing your presentation and specific information on requirements such as font size) with three slides focusing on the design of your mission and at least one slide on each of the following considerations:

• Energy
• Scientific merit
• Technology
• Economic
• Societal considerations, and
• Human factors

In the slides supporting your design, be sure to include descriptions of details such as launchers, stages, cargo ships, orbiters, landers, etc. that would be part of your mission.

• Pick appropriate propulsion systems for your rockets and design your spaceship to hold the rest of the components needed to complete your mission. The components should work together as a system. For example, recall how VASMIR plans to use the hydrogen fuel as shielding from radiation.
• You can use PowerPoint for this or you can use some other tool like Flash or Squeak (free, multimedia authoring environment).
• You can integrate your animation into your PowerPoint presentation or present it separately.

Energy considerations need to include the types of energy required (chemical, solar, nuclear, etc.) and the energy transformations involved during the mission. For example, if you had a chemical rocket, on take-off the chemical energy would be transformed into kinetic energy to get the rocket moving and gravitational potential energy to escape the Earth's gravity. Refer to the video to be sure that you discuss kinetic energy, gravitational potential energy, chemical energy, nuclear energy, etc. correctly. You may require many different types of rockets to achieve your goal. Could you find more fuel en route?

Design your science experiments based on your destination and what you desire to accomplish. Use physical principles to design the equipment you use to perform the experiment.

Describe the technologies that will have to be developed to complete your mission. A consideration here will be if your mission is manned or robotic, in whole or in part. Remember you are dreamers so you may use technology not yet available but your ideas should be based on known principles of physics.

You could address economic considerations with a cost-benefit analysis (where you compare the benefits to the cost) and you could compare the cost of your design to other possible designs.

A discussion of the benefits and possible harm to society resulting from your mission should be included.

Since there are hazards in space and the environment is hostile to humans, there are many human factors you need to address if your mission is manned.

Many of the considerations listed will overlap. For example, human factors could be involved in an important science experiment and could have an impact on the choice of energy source. It is important that you plan to consider the relationship between the considerations if you want your mission to be well received.