A team of teen scientists from Dublin and Clare has won a prestigious space design competition founded by NASA and administered by the US's National Space Society.
The seven 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 this year's NSS Space Settlement Contest, which attracted 26,000 entrants from schools around the world.
Their innovative orbital habitat, called 'Inis Beatha' or 'Island of Life', is designed to support more than 10,000 people, and to serve as a manufacturing and transport hub for exploring the Moon and our solar system.
The 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.
"I was really delighted when I heard that we’d won," said Shreya Mariya Saju, one of the girls from St Dominic's. "I told everyone at home and they were overjoyed."
The Irish-designed space habitat 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 almost indefinitely.
Operating free of earth's gravity, Inis Beatha could be used as a base for lunar colonisation, and for exploring the planets and asteroids beyond the Earth's orbit.
The team's members - Shreya Mariya Saju and Lexie McKenna from the Cabra girls' school, and Alex Furey, Damian Woros, Najib Haq, Gavin Shiels and Ahmed Ibrahim from St Flannan's - include students with interests not only in physics and aeronautics, but chemistry and biology, and law as well.
"My part was creating the closed loop system for water and 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," said Lexie McKenna.
"I looked at Space law, things like jurisdictions, governance and the day-to-day running of a settlement" said Alex Furey.
"It has been an absolutely incredible, amazing experience. It teaches you a lot about research, project development and especially about team work as well."
Alex discovered one interesting local connection. The Catholic bishop of Orlando is informally regarded as the bishop of the Moon and the current incumbent, John Noonan, was actually born in Limerick. "I just think that is a funny connection", he said.
"I looked at the organic structure of lunar dust and how you might be able to add products to create concrete", said Gavin Sheils.
Shreya worked to identify the strains and species of plant suitable for the project, studying previous efforts to grow plants in space. Key crops would include soy beans, tomatoes and, as you might expect, potatoes, from strains modified and proven to be viable in space.
Fiona Dockery, their teacher, said that 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.
And while the teenagers plan journeys to other worlds, their support teams at base have a different transport problem. With less than three months to go, both schools now need to raise money to send their students to Florida, where they have been invited to present their plan to the NSS conference and mingle with fellow enthusiasts and experts.
"If they’re going to make it to Florida in June, the fundraising has to start now," said Ann Cameron, principal of St Dominic's College. "We're hoping the public will come to their help. And we'd be delighted to get business sponsorship. It's not everyday that a business in Cabra or Clare gets to lend its name to space exploration."
"We are very hopeful we will get to Orlando now, but we need to fundraise first, we need sponsors", said Gavin Sheils.
The event in Orlando is the biggest space development conference in the world.
"This is a fantastic opportunity. Space science is getting very big and [Going to Orlando] has the potential to be life-changing for our students," said St Flannan's Physics teacher John Conneely.
"We have been invited, now we just need to raise the funds to get there."
