Written by: Michelle Lucas, Higher Orbits
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Higher Orbits Galactic HQ – Higher Orbits held their first New Mexico Go For Launch! event in Las Cruces September 19-20. CEO Michelle Lucas, and retired NASA Astronaut Wendy Lawrence, spent two days with students from Las Cruces at the Challenger Learning Center, teaching them about space, microgravity research, and provide them with an out of this world opportunity.
The students, grade 8-12 from across the Las Cruces Public Schools district and area, formed teams to compete in a payload design competition. They were given instructions on what size and limitations the payload had to adhere to, but then were told to come up with their own original idea of what they would send to space, and what information they planned to get from the experiment.
Five teams designed payload proposals which ranged from ants and praying mantis experiments, to sending a desert tarantula and a rock crab to low Earth orbit. Ultimately the team, named Sunny Side Up, won the competition with a payload proposal to send sea cucumbers to space to study their regenerative properties, and to see if they could be a food source for astronauts on long-term missions. The students who are part of Team Sunny Side Up are Alanalisa Baca (Vista), Angela Perez (Vista) Karis Vasquez and Audrey Smith (White Sands).
The winning team’s design will now go into a national competition to have their payload sent to the International Space Station. They will find out which payload has been selected as the winners of the overall Go For Launch! Series at the beginning of next year.
After concluding the two days of Go For Launch! Las Cruces, Michelle and Wendy then joined Spaceport America’s Open House as guest speakers, sharing their experiences at NASA, and the power of STEAM outreach events with the visitors.
Higher Orbits was developed 10 years ago by CEO Michelle Lucas. Michelle formerly worked at NASA in Mission Control and as an Astronaut Trainer. Because of her experiences as a child, and in her work in industry, she was moved to give back and to bring space inspired STEM to the “backyards” of students across the country with hands-on project-based learning so she began Higher Orbits and the Go For Launch! program. The STEM organization has held 93 Go For Launch! events around the country and has sent 24 student experiments to the space at that time. Currently there are 4 Higher Orbits student experiments onboard the International Space Station. New Mexico is the 23rd state to host a Go For Launch! event.
Higher Orbits will be traveling to Albuquerque with NASA Astronaut Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger next month for another opportunity for New Mexico students to compete in the national competition. For more information on the event being held on October 19-20, head to HigherOrbits.org.
About Higher Orbits
Founded in 2015, Higher Orbits is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization creating an experiential
learning lab for secondary school students across the United States, focused on the multifaceted
worlds of space exploration, research, and spaceflight in order to launch the next
generation workforce our world desires. www.higherorbits.org/
About Go For Launch!
Go For Launch! is a multi-day program (not overnight) that uses space exploration as a platform to launch student involvement in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM), STEAM (Art), teamwork, communication, and leadership. Throughout the event participants work with an Astronaut (for the whole event) as well as other space and STEM professionals and compete to have their experiment launched into space!
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