FIVE SECONDARY SCHOOL students have this morning flown from Shannon Airport to Orlando after winning a prestigious NASA space design competition. 

The Co Clare students from St Flannan’s College will first fly to Chicago before heading on to Orlando, where they will present their winning design at the International Space Development Conference.

The conference is an annual gathering organised by the National Space Society, which brings together “leaders and enthusiasts from all sectors of the space industry”.

The five students from St Flannan’s - Alex Furey, Damian Woros, Najib Haq, Gavin Shiels and Ahmed Ibrahim – collaborated with Cabra’s St Dominic’s College students Shreya Mariya Saju and Lexie McKenna to design their winning entry. 

Named ‘Inis Beatha’, or ‘Island of Life’, the next generation space habitat uses artificial gravity and plants grown without soil to create a system capable of recycling the food, water, and oxygen needed to sustain life in space.

Each of the students, who between them have interests in physics, aeronautics, chemistry and biology, came up with different uses for how the habitat could be used. Some of them envisage it being used for lunar or planetary missions in the future, as a forward-operating base.

Inis Beatha could also be used to assemble or manufacture spacecraft parts needed for expeditions, which would cut spaceship construction costs. The “hollow-ring donut” design, known as a three-quarter cut truncated torus, might also allow for the processing and transporting of rare minerals mined from the moon or asteroids.

The group won the top award for a senior group project this year, after the students looked into every minute detail of the habitat, including researching how it could work within existing space laws and examining how to create concrete using moon dust. 

The students won the competition in April this year after beating out 26,000 other entries. 

The students were supported by their teachers, John Conneely, Teresa Considine and Michael Horgan at St Flannan’s in Ennis, and Adrieanne Healy and Fiona Dockery at St Dominic’s in Cabra.

Speaking from Shannon Airport ahead of their flight to Chicago, physics teacher John Conneely said that the school “couldn’t be prouder” of its students for the “incredible achievement. He thanked the airport for making the trip possible for the five students at St Flannan’s College.

Shannon Airport’s Tim Ryan said that the airport was “thrilled” to welcome the team and are proud to support the five boys and their teachers on their trip to Orlando.