Welcome to Wallington County Grammar School Online!
Term begins 8.30 a.m. on Monday 6th September for Year 7 pupils and members of the Lower Sixth.
All other year groups should arrive in time for registration at 9.30 a.m. on Monday 6th September.
Wallington Pupils Win the World Finals of NASA’s International Space Settlement Design Competition
Flying out to Houston was the end of a long road for the finalists, having already won two rounds of selection in the UK and beating over 60 schools to win a place. The national finals were sponsored by the UK Space Agency and organised by Imperial College London and of the original team of twelve the three best went forward to represent the UK along with pupils from Pate’s Grammar School and the City of London Academy.
In Houston, the UK students joined with three other national teams, two from America and one from Pakistan, to form the fictional aerospace corporation, Vulture Aviation. Each company had a corporate structure closely mirroring that of an actual aerospace business, and was guided by two volunteers with extensive backgrounds in the industry. The challenge facing the teams at the finals was to design a human settlement for the surface of Mars in 2060, providing habitation and life-support for 24,000 colonists. The surface of Mars poses many problems for human habitation, including a thin atmosphere, devoid of breathable oxygen, lack of fertile soil for growing crops, and high levels of cosmic radiation.
In just over 40 hours, the Vulture Aviation team devised their proposal and presented it before the panel of judges, complete with settlement plans and a full financial costing estimate. Their solution was to site their colony at the bottom of Valles Marineris, a deep gash in the crust of Mars. They proposed building a terraced opening cut back into the cliff face of the canyon, and to employ life support systems for regenerating oxygen and water that are already being developed by the European Space Agency. Plants were grown by enhancing crushed Martian rock with fertilisers and bacteria to create Earth-like soil.
Alongside thinking ingeniously about solutions to scientific and engineering problems, the winning team was also very creative in their consideration of the psychological impact of extraterrestrial living. Houses were designed with many automated features to maximize the comfort of the colonists, and gardens and parks were provided to create a green Earth-like environment; a bubble of vitality within the barren landscape of Mars. The team’s winning design was proposed as a 14 year construction programme, at an estimated cost of $1.8 trillion, and was judged the best by a panel of specialists led by competition co-founder Anita Gale.
All the pupils involved, even those that didn’t make it all the way to the Houston finals, found the experience inspirational, and developed key skills in applications of science, working within engineering constraints, and business management. The students particularly valued being pushed beyond their own expectations. “Whether it be using our scientific knowledge to solve what seems at first to be an impossible problem, or vainly trying to please everyone at once, the ISSDC has tested all of us to our limits and has been an experience none of us will ever forget.”
This is a fantastic achievement for the three Wallington pupils, not only getting the chance to represent the UK, but to also win the world finals, besting teams from countries from Australia to Russian and we wish them all the best in their future careers. All three have places at University with Sam Ackerman going on to the University of Surrey to do Economics, Sammy El-Bahrawy is going to Cambridge to study Mathematics and Adam James is going on to Leeds to study Physics.
John Hutchinson, Director of Science.
A team from Wallington, consisting of 6th form students Adam James, Sammy El-Bahrawy and Sam Ackerman returned home in triumph over the summer after representing the UK at NASA’s International Space Settlement Design Competition. The weekend of the 30th July saw the grand finals of the Competition, hosted at the heart of the NASA space programme, the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas.