CalTech Space Challenge¶
The CalTech Space Challenge is a highly competitive 1-week event during which two teams of have to address a pre-defined mission statement and come up with a complete mission proposal, including all necessary analysis and fulfillment of mission objectives. For us, the mission statement was the following:
In 5 days, each team is challenged to design a mission to land humans on an asteroid brought back to lunar orbit, extract the asteroid’s resources and demonstrate their use
During the competition, CalTech hosts multiple small seminars aimed at building skill required for this type of study and during the last two days members of the NASA JPL A-Team (systems engineering) are available for questions and input to the mission design. At the end, each team has to submit a complete report and present their findings in front of a jury of academic and industry experts. My main respoinsbilities within the team were the system engineering itself, budgeting, structures and launch considerations.
Besides the enormous lack of sleep, the entire week is a lot of fun and includes
a tremendous amount of learning, conflict resolution and team building. If you are
interested, you can download the final presentation of our team here:
Team Explorer final presentation
There are also multiple interesting videos on YouTube: