St Flannan’s pupils blast off to Washington

Four junior pupils from St Flannan’s College have boldly gone on to win second place in their category at the elite NASA/Ames annual space settlement design competition.
They will now travel to the International Space Development Conference in Washington DC next month.
The competition challenges pupils to engineer and design a self-sufficient space colony capable of housing thousands of inhabitants. The judging criteria is based on their creativity, thoroughness, accuracy, technical merit, attention to detail and background research. The space settlement has to break no physical laws, have a reasonable extrapolation of existing technology, a clean internal environment, minimal leaks and be pragmatic.
This has been the best result to date for the Science Club in St Flannan’s College. In 2010, a larger team came third place and in 2011 a different team came in the highly recommended category. The winning team this year is made up of one third-year pupil, Caitlyn Horgan, and three second-year pupils, Mike O’Dea, Peter O’Connell Stack and Natalia Abramczyk with the project named An Terra Nua. They are part of a larger international team made up of pupils from Japan, India, Ireland and the USA. The Irish team were responsible for designing the overall space settlement structure and many of its subsystems. The settlement consists of a double torus spinning around a central cylinder. It is self-sufficient, orbits the Earth and is capable of housing 20,000 inhabitants in each torus.
The winning team has been invited to present their paper at the International Space Development Conference, ISDC, to be held in Washington in May. The conference will listen to the winning space settlement design entries with interest. The ISDC also covers several broad areas of study relating to building a space-faring civilisation. Areas such as transportation to and from space, technology needed to live and work in space and Earth-based activities to advocate for or educate others about space development. Guest speakers are Project Mercury astronauts, US Senator John Glenn and US Commander Scott Carpenter.  This year marks the 50th anniversary of Glenn’s and Carpenter’s historic flights in 1962 as the first two American astronauts to orbit the Earth.
Microsemi Ireland is funding the ISDC trip to the US for the St Flannan’s pupils. Richard Finn, vice-president and general manager of Microsemi Ireland, is enthusiastic about helping St Flannan’s students and is pleased again that this year a major Ennis employer can help pupils fulfil their dreams.