Montana State hosts high school students who have engineered potential solutions to space-travel problems

BOZEMAN - Teams of high school students from Montana and Wyoming gathered at Montana State University Tuesday to show off the potential solutions they have engineered to space travel problems and compete for a chance to present their projects to NASA officials at Johnson Space Center in Houston for possible implementation on future space missions. The event is part of a program called NASA HUNCH that fosters STEM skills.

The HUNCH program - HUNCH stands for High School Students United with NASA to Create Hardware - challenges approximately 3,300 high school students from 27 states to develop solutions to a variety of problems faced by astronauts on the International Space Station. At the MSU event, 24 teams of three to five students demonstrated working models of their creations. There are slots for 60 promising projects nationwide to be reviewed in Houston.

"This is a real-world opportunity for high school students to turn ideas in their heads into ideas in their hands," said Glenn Johnson, NASA's manager of design and prototype for HUNCH, who also served as a judge for the demonstrations. "NASA needs these people. We have former HUNCH students working at NASA."

This week's HUNCH event was sponsored by NASA, MSU's Norm Asbjornson College of Engineering and the Montana Space Grant Consortium, a statewide, NASA-funded education, research and outreach program headquartered at MSU. The consortium is part of NASA's national Space Grant College and Fellowship Program, which supports STEM - or science, technology, engineering and mathematics - education and aerospace activities across the United States. According to its website, part of the consortium's mission is to strengthen Montana's education and research capacity in NASA-related fields, with a focus on hands-on learning, innovation and workforce development in aerospace, and STEM.

"I hope that today inspires you," said Christine Foreman, associate dean for student success in MSU's engineering college, while delivering opening remarks in Asbjornson Hall. "I hope that it shows you that places like MSU can be a home for your ideas and your creativity and to show you what you're capable of."

Participating students came from high schools in Billings, Bozeman, Laurel, as well as from Jackson, Wyoming, and Ethete, Wyoming.

Glenn Bradbury, an engineering teacher at Gallatin High School in Bozeman, mentored three teams at HUNCH this year. Bradbury said two of his previous teams have advanced their projects to Houston.

"One of the most important things these students can learn is that there are no answers to these problems in the back of the book," he said. "It's up to them to solve them."

Representing the Billings Career Center, faculty member Eric Anderson brought five teams that included students from three high schools to the NASA HUNCH event this year. He said the Billings Career Center averages two teams per year that advance to Houston.

"I tell them, 'If you think you're done, you didn't do it right,'" Anderson said. "There's always room for improvement."

One of the Billings Career Center's teams created a trash ejector to expel trash, such as empty food pouches, from Mars-bound spaceships to reduce weight, save space and improve sanitation. The team proposed a gas-based ejection system that uses methane as a propellant, repurposing a resource that would otherwise be vented into space. The three-person team's solution would jettison canisters roughly the size of a 5-gallon bucket away from the spaceship, where they would ultimately burn up in Mars' atmosphere. The team emphasized that its design was built using existing NASA technologies, such as airlocks and pressurization systems, which they believe would make it feasible to implement. The prototype includes a custom-designed mechanical fail-secure system to prevent the inner and outer airlock doors from being opened simultaneously, a critical requirement for astronaut safety.

The Billings-based team comprises Alexander Force, a junior at West High School; Logan Meredith, a junior at Skyview High School; and Tighe Stiles, a sophomore at Senior High School. Each represented Billings Career Center, where they attend classes at least part time.

"The astronauts eat food, they use spare parts, they build up trash and that trash equals weight," Force said. "So, when the vehicle is coming into Mars' atmosphere, we want to get rid of all of that weight so we can slow down easier and use less gas. That also creates more space for the astronauts and helps to minimize bacteria growth."

The team's slogan is, "Shooting trash to save on gas."

Other projects included prototypes for a lunar jumping robot, which could be used to get a bird's eye view of the moon's landscape; a collapsable hygiene stall intended to improve the bathing facilities currently available to astronauts aboard the International Space Station; a water module to hydrate substrate in microgravity or zero gravity; a lunar sample collector, which can pick up baseball-sized moon rocks and seal them in an airtight container; the development of novel uses for retired clothing previously worn by astronauts; and a storage area called a collapsable supply garage.

Johnson said he expects NASA will announce in the next week or so which team or teams from the MSU event will advance to Houston.