Open to teams of undergraduate and/or graduate students studying fields with applications to human space exploration, NASA’s RASC-AL Competition is an engineering design challenge that allows students to incorporate their coursework into real aerospace design concepts and work together in a team environment. This year’s competition is also seeking space-minded business, management, and space policy students to form multidisciplinary teams alongside traditional engineering majors.
The 2023 RASC-AL themes range from supporting lunar operations and tourism at the south and north poles, to enabling long-term survival on the surface of Mars. Each team’s proposal should include novel and robust technologies, capabilities, and operational models to support expanding humanity’s ability to thrive beyond Earth in response to one of four themes:
Homesteading Mars: Develop a crewed human exploration architecture of Mars that can enable astronauts to survive on the surface of Mars for at least 7 years with minimal support from Earth.
Lunar North Pole Tourism: Develop a profitable business case and associated architecture for bringing tourists to the lunar north pole, using a mix of NASA-derived and in-development commercial systems.
Lunar Surface Transporter Vehicle: Develop a vehicle concept for offloading, moving, deploying, and supporting payloads on the lunar surface, up to the scale of habitats.
Multi-use Platform at L1: Develop an architecture and system concept for a platform that provides spacecraft services and logistics, as well as space observations and communications, deployed to and operated from the Earth-Moon First LaGrange Point (L1) in cislunar space.
Teams who submit an NOI by the deadline will be invited to attend an interactive Q&A Session with the NASA Sponsors on October 27, 2022. For more information click here.
