The Mars Society is proud to announce the publication of its new book Students to Mars! The Mars Society’s International Design Competition for High School Students 2022-2023.
Around the world, in all the best university engineering programs, students encounter at some point a class different from all the others. This is the engineering design class, within which, instead of being tested as individuals on their mastery of lectures and texts, the class is challenged to work as a team to design a complex engineering system like a jet fighter or a fusion reactor.
Inevitability, the best solutions for each subsystem will conflict with the rest. For example, more powerful engines would maximize a fighter aircraft’s speed, but take away mass that could be used for more weapons or stronger structures, and improving anything almost always leads to higher costs. So trades need to be made to try to find the best compromise. It is a deeply creative process, which is sometimes intensified further by different universities compete their designs against each other in intercollegiate tournaments.
Could this same methodology be used to tech science to high school students? The Mars Society decided to find out. During the summers of 2022 and 2023 teams of students were challenged to design a human mission to Mars, and then to debate the merits of their designs against each other. The results were amazing.
Each summer Mars mission designs were developed by five teams and competed for merit based on their science return and engineering merit, just as is done in university engineering design competitions. But the contest went further than that, when each team was given a half hour to offer critiques of the other teams’ designs, and then a further half hour to defend their design against any attacks. As a result, the contest was far sharper than any standard university design contest, and with knowledge transformed from a burden to a tool, or even a weapon, students learned far more than they would in any normal class.
Not only that, with their designs driven by the imperative to produce the maximum science return at minimum risk and cost, their quality was far higher than the vendor-driven concepts produced by any NASA human Mars exploration design reference mission team for the past 20 years!
This may seem like a tall claim, but the designs of all ten teams are in the book. Pick up a copy of Students to Mars! and see for yourself what young minds can really do!
Students to Mars! is now available on Amazon in both paperback and kindle.
