Spencer students compete at NASA

(Photo submitted) Spencer High School students attended the Space Settlement Design Competition at NASA. The group (back row) Nick Lewis, Andrew Upah, Tyler Kramer, Aaron Brockshus, Abby Bedore, Sarah Dillard, Mary Krull, and (front) Craig Cunningham took the ferry that crosses the Houston Ship Channel between Galveston Island and Bolivar Peninsula.

With funding from the Spencer Schools Foundation, eight Spencer High School students and two teachers traveled to NASA in Houston, Texas.

Abby Bedore, Aaron Brockshus, Craig Cunningham, Sara Dillard, Tyler Kramer, Mary Krull, Nick Lewis and Andrew Upah, chaperoned by teachers Dave Munson and Elli Wiemers, joined approximately 180 other students and chaperones from 24 northwest Iowa schools on a five-day trip to the Space Settlement Design Contest at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The competition began 11 years ago when Holstein native, and former NASA employee, Jim Christensen collaborated with another NASA employee involved in education outreach to bring students from Houston high schools together with NASA employees to simulate all aspects of designing a space settlement. When Christensen moved back to Iowa to become a science consultant for Northwest AEA in Sioux City he brought the program with him.

The preliminaries of this year's contest had the 160 students cracking a code to determine which of four "companies," each headed up by a NASA engineer as CEO, they would work for. The teens put their skills to use as managers, structural engineers, human engineers, operations engineers and animation engineers to design a space settlement large enough to house 6,000 people orbiting the moon 50 years in the future.

"We really encouraged our kids to put themselves out there -- to take leadership roles within their companies. They definitely gave 100 percent," said Wiemers, SHS math teacher.

Cunningham was chosen as president of his company. His job was to coordinate the efforts of all teams of workers to lead them through the design process and presentation.

"This competition was, hands down, the most difficult challenge, academically, I have faced thus far in my life, yet very rewarding," Cunningham said.

Students worked at Johnson Space Center in Building 9, a high-security facility where tourists typically process behind thick glass in a corridor separating NASA equipment from the public. Building 9 houses full-size high fidelity mockups of the space shuttle and the International Space Station.

Dillard was chosen as vice president of marketing for her company. Kramer was elected to be director of structural engineering by his peers within his company. Kramer led a team of eight structural engineers to design their space station including the stages of design on earth and in orbit. Kramer's team's innovative design earned special mention by the judges.

Bedore worked as an operations engineer, designing the aspects of the space settlement involving arrangement of power systems such as electricity and sewage; Brockshus and Krull both worked as human engineers -- charged with the task of making life in space more like life on earth, including the design of housing, nutrition, healthcare, education and recreation.

Lewis, like Kramer, was a structural engineer whose task was to design the solar panels to power his company's space station. Upah worked as an animations engineer. He designed robots that would help construct the space station, plus any other robots necessary for transportation and day-to-day life in space.

Students worked or 18 hours straight to pull together information marketed in 50 pages to 11 judges. The judges consisted of NASA engineers and contractors. Students had 25 minutes to present their findings and 10 minutes for answering questions.

The first place team included Cunningham and Krull.

Twelve members of this company will return to Houston in July for the International Space Settlement Design Competition. Cunningham will return as president of the company. Krull is first alternate; she will make the trip if one of the other team members is unable to attend.

Everly native and long-time NASA computer engineer David Goeken, a resident of Houston, made a special appearance to Johnson Space Center Saturday to visit the team and offer his encouragement to the young scientists.