Aerospace Design students from Makua Lani Christian Academy in Kailua-Kona will be traveling to Rocket Park in Houston, Texas, to present their engineering projects to NASA engineers.
Both of the school’s teams — the Lunar Habitat Shoe team and the Magnetic Boot team — are finalists in the NASA HUNCH program. NASA engineers may choose elements of the students’ engineering to use in upcoming NASA space missions.
The Lunar Habitat Shoe team was led by student Anja Marie Henriques and features a Lunar Trolley, which allowed her to experience walking in reduced gravity. Their project solves the problem of walking on the Moon in future habitations as part of NASA’s Artemis program.
The Magnetic Boot team invented a mag boot that NASA may use for space walks on the steel hull of a SpaceX Starship.
On March 18, Frederick Herrmann, director of the school’s Astronautics and Space Program, was presented the National Space Educator of the Year Award by the National Space Club. The event, #SpaceProm, took place in Washington, D.C., at the Washington Hilton and was attended by the iconic Bill Nye, Firefly CEO Tom Markusic, and Airbus CEO Robert Geckle, as well as five astronauts. SpaceX engineers and the Mars Ingenuity helicopter director were also award winners.
Herrmann was presented the award for his previous work with his students, including two international grand prize wins in the National Space Society’s Space Settlement Contest, a 2021 NASA HUNCH Finalist win for a space helmet food retrieval device, and a 2021 patent on spacecraft shielding. The team will also be participating in the ZERO-G program that utilizes zero gravity experiments on parabolic plane flights.
Last month, Makua Lani’s team also won its first rocket launch in the NASA TechRise program. Their experiment, Granular Flow, submitted by lead inventors Mikaella Casino and Lynelle Yadao-Ellazar, will fly into space and experience three minutes of zero gravity, during which time the experiment will take place.
The Aerospace Design students are currently engineering the experiment with funds supplied by the NASA program.