SEVEN SECONDARY SCHOOL students from Ireland will address an expert space conference in Florida, USA after winning first place in a global contest.

Shreya Mariya Saju and Lexie McKenna from St Dominic’s College in Dublin 7 and Alex Furey, Damian Woros, Najib Haq, Gavin Shiels and Ahmed Ibrahim from St Flannan’s College in Co Clare worked as a team to win first place in the highly competitive NSS Space Settlement Contest last week.

The annual competition – which attracted 26,000 entrants this year – was launched by Nasa and tasks students aged between 11 and 18 to design a free-floating and permanent living quarters for humans to reside in space.

Team from St. Dominic's College, Cabra and St Flannan's College, Ennis (bottom).

Shreya, Lexie, Alex, Damian, Najib, Gavin and Ahmed designed Inis Beatha – meaning the Island of Life – as an orbital habitat designed for 10,000 people, fitted with artificial gravity and hydroponic genetically-modified plants.

Its closed loop system would allow it to recycle food, water and oxygen – keys to sustaining life in space almost indefinitely – and the habitat would run off solar energy.

Lexie explained: “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.”

Graphic of the design concept by students from St Dominic's College and St. Flannan's College.

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 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.

Each student will give a presentation at the International Space Development Conference in Florida this year, which is attended by leading experts in the space industry, astronauts, scientists and space fans.

Conneely and principal of St Dominic’s College Ann Cameron have said that the students will need to fund the trip themselves, and are asking the public to provide donations to them and pitching the trip to local businesses in order to get to Florida in June.

Cameron said: “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.”