Aerospace Education Competition in USA - Spaceset

The International Space Settlement Design Competition (ISSDC) has come a long way since its inception in the early 1980s as part of a Boy Scouts program in the US. What started off as a space exploratory program for high-school students in the US, is now a full-fledged global competition with participating students from India, the UK, Australia, Canada and even some places from South America. Now, there are multiple semi-finals in the US itself to give US high-school students a better platform to compete in the global ISSDC finals at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. One of such semi-finals is the Southwestern Semi-final SSD competition, which takes place in Arizona. The competition follows the same pattern as is followed elsewhere. Students conceptualize and design a futuristic space settlement in accordance with certain specified parameters. The winning team proceeds through to the quarterfinals, the semi-finals and the finals at the ISSDC where it is pitted again...

When Star Trek first beamed into our living rooms through television channels a few decades back, it cast a vision of a future for humankind. That vision was about having a settlement in space. Gradually yet steadily the space research is getting closer to realising that vision.  Almost 70 years have passed since the first broadcast, and while we have not yet established a colony in space, we have made a permanent settlement of sorts there - the International Space Station (ISS). Now, astronauts from several countries take turns to stay there as part of the ISS crew, with rockets from NASA or Russia ferrying loads of essential supplies to them. Space settlement, or, rather space colonisation, has been a long cherished desire for mankind. The most recent exploration towards finding a habitable environment in space was the NASA rover exploration on Mars. The intent was to find traces of atmospheric elements that could support life on the Red Planet the same way life is sup...