Design to house 24,000 humans in cities on other planets.
By Dileep Thekkethil
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BENGALURU: Space agencies have been thinking of building human colonies on neighboring planets for a while, but they could make little progress.
Now, a team of 12 students from Amity International School, Noida, Uttar Pradesh, has given NASA a new design of how to build space cities that can inhabit 24,000 humans. The design won the prestigious Annual International Space Settlement Competition (ISDCC) that was held at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The team of students comprised of Dhruv Khanna, Aabhas Vaish, Aman Agarwal, Anuj Harisinghani, Rishab Srivastava, Chittaranjan Prasad, Suchit Jain, Rahul Rajput, Tanay Asia, Anant Chaturvedi, Grishma Purewal of class 11 and Mudit Gupta of class 10. They were the only team from Asia to participate in the competition. The students were part of a company “Vulture Aviation”, which had students participating from Latin America, North America, UK and the USA, reported The Hindustan Times.
According to the report, ISDCC has been training industrial skills to high school students, equipping them with skill sets required for aerospace engineers as they are entrusted to design a city in space that can house 10,000 people.
The report says the students designed two main settlements in space, with four outlying settlements capable of inhabiting a population of 24,000 in addition to a transient population of 3,000 on Mars using a transparent mineral called ‘Aluminum Oxynitride’.
During the different phases of designing the space settlement, the students worked closely with experts in NASA who taught them structural engineering, automation, operations, human engineering, marketing and finance, and cost.
Dr. Amita Chauhan, chairperson, Amity International Schools, said, “We are proud to have such brilliant students who have made the country proud with their talent and hard work. We are inspired by scientist and visionary Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam’s work in science and technology. We had been participating in the competition for eight years now, but this year we finally made it to the top.”
The students were quoted by different media outlets saying their consorted effort, hard work and dedication for the yearlong project was the reason why they came out victorious. They also shared the excitement of having been involved in the research for developing a colony in Mars, which required them to identifying the right mineral to use in the design of the colony, waste water management, external transportation, generation of power, water recycling, cargo handling distribution and storing of electricity, and to and fro transportation from earth.