Caltech Space Challenge – Student Competition, 2019

The Caltech Space Challenge, a 5-day International student space mission design competition, has opened application for 2019.

The Challenge is a unique opportunity for young and enthusiastic students to build technical and teamwork skills, interact with world-renowed experts in space exploration and connect to like-minded peers from all around the world.

32 talented and highly-motivated students are brought to the Caltech campus to participate in a week-long space mission design competition. The participants are split into two teams and both teams work under the mentorship of experts from industry, NASA and academia to design their mission concept from scratch to final proposal.

The 2019 competition is dedicated to Saturn’s moon Enceladus — initially thought to be a dead body, and the exploration for extraterrestrial life on it.

Invited participants will come to Caltech during spring break 2019 and join one of two sixteen-member teams. Teams have just five days to design their mission from scratch to final proposal. Both teams benefit from working under the mentorship of experienced engineers and managers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and private industry. Additionally, throughout the week leaders from the aerospace sector hold lectures to help students contextualize and solve different aspects of their missions. Finally, at the end of the week a panel of judges from industry, government, and academia selects the winning proposal based on technical merit, innovation, and presentation.

The Caltech Space Challenge was started in 2011 by Caltech graduate students Prakhar Mehrotra and Jonathan Mihaly and was hosted by the Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS) and the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories at Caltech (GALCIT). Participants of the 2011 challenge designed a crewed mission to a Near-Earth Object (NEO). The second edition of the Caltech Space Challenge, held in 2013, developed a crewed mission to a Martian moon. In 2015, participants of the third Caltech Space Challenge were asked to design a mission that would land humans on an asteroid brought into Lunar orbit, extract the asteroid’s resources and demonstrate their use. The fourth edition, held in 2017, challenged participants with the design of Lunarport, a launch and supply station on the Moon for deep space missions.

For more information please visit the following link:
Caltech Space Challenge – Student Competition, 2019