Four students from Pella High School traveled to the Johnson Space Center to participate in NASA’s Space Settlement Design Competition (SSDC).

Zion Miller, Elizabeth Sales, Lindsey Hood, and Sarah Van Norden represented Pella and joined approximately 200 other students from Iowa and Texas.

Miller tells KNIA/KRLS News the competition is designed to provide students with experiences similar to those encountered by real engineers.

“The project down in Houston was to design a spacecraft on Mercury that would be able to go around the planet to pick up ore–that’s a mining expedition, so we were supposed to design how this would look and how this would function, basically down to the letter as best as we could, and then we would submit that proposal after working on it for 22 hours to a panel of judges who were NASA or Boeing scientists,” he says.

Sarah Van Norden was a member of the team that won the competition, and will be the first ever Pella student to participate in the international competition at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida this July.

“I’ve never really experienced something with a whole bunch of people from different country, so I’m excited to see their views on things and hopefully see that work well together,” she says.

Tune into Let’s Talk Pella Monday to hear from the group.