The Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP) was launched in June 2010 by the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education (NCESSE) in strategic partnership with Nanoracks, LLC. Designed as a model U.S. national Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education initiative, the program gives students across a participating community the ability to design and propose real microgravity experiments to fly in low Earth orbit (experiments conducted in a “weightless” environment). SSEP was first carried out aboard the final two flights of the U.S. Space Shuttle Program in 2011 (STS-134 Endeavour, STS-135 Atlantis). In 2012 SSEP transitioned to operations on the International Space Station (ISS) – America’s newest National Laboratory.
Program Overview
Each community participating in SSEP is provided a very real research asset – launch services to transport one student team designed microgravity experiment to the International Space Station (ISS) where it is operated by the astronauts. The experiment is designed for operation in a flight certified, straightforward to use microgravity research mini-laboratory. After a typical 4 to 6 week stay in orbit, the experiment will be returned to Earth for harvesting and analysis by the community’s student flight team.
Mirroring how professional researchers formally compete to obtain limited research assets, the participating community carries out a ‘call for proposals’. More specifically, the community conducts a local Flight Experiment Design Competition, engaging potentially hundreds of students in teams of typically 3-5, with each team vying for the community’s single experiment slot by proposing a microgravity research program that can be carried out in the mini-laboratory. The competition is conducted through formal submission of real (but grade level appropriate) research proposals by the student teams – as is standard practice for professional researchers. 50-80 flight experiment proposals are typically secured across a single pre-college community. At least 10 proposals are required for an undergraduate community.
Each community’s flight experiment is selected through a formal 2-step proposal review process. The final selection is carried out by the SSEP National Step 2 Review Board, which typically meets at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, or NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. The flight experiment then undergoes a 4-month NASA flight safety review at Johnson Space Center; laboratory refinement by the student flight team; handover to Nanoracks in Houston for integration into the SSEP experiments payload; and payload integration into the ferry vehicle for flight to ISS. SSEP experiment payloads launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft