Young Minds for Space Exploration

For the first time, Australian students have become finalists in an international aerospace competition, and we need your help to get us to the award announcement in Florida, USA!

We've designed the future of manned exploration of outer space, an Earth-independent Space Station capable of simulating Earth's gravity. We need your help to cover the costs of 6 students travelling to Cocoa Beach, Florida from Melbourne, Australia to present our concepts at the Forum for the 2016 Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts - Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) design competition.

This year, an undergraduate student team of volunteers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT
University) has been part of a joint entry with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to conceptualize a space station capable of simulating Earth's gravity by rotation about its central axis (as seen in popular movies like The Martian and 2001: A Space Odyssey). This endeavor began in October 2015, and our research and designs have survived two extremely competitive knock-out rounds and we have reached the final stage of the competition.
We've named the mission H.E.R.M.E.S after the Greek God, and stands for the Habitable Environment for Research and Manned Exploration of Space. The mission has the long-term goal to sustain human life over multiple generations while being Earth-Independent. This means the mission needs to be entirely self-sufficient; therefore we've chosen to place it in an orbit around the Moon to utilize the abundance of water, aluminium and other useful resources on the Moon to achieve Earth-independence. A full description of the competition can be found here.

The team has been invited to present our findings to a panel of aerospace experts at the RASC-AL Forum at Cocoa Beach, Florida as part of the final round competing among 11 other teams. The remarkable accomplishments of the team is an Australian first, and warrants the presence at the award announcement. Six RMIT University students are preparing to make the journey: team leader George Coulloupas with aerospace engineering students Angus Muffatti, Daniel Chadwick, Ethan Ross, Johnathan O'Neil Donnellon and Marvin To.

We would be very grateful to have you support our journey alongside RMIT's School of Engineering, to the USA to represent Australian tertiary education as well as our local engineering and research communities.

Thank-you!
This graphic is for presentative and conceptual purposes only. NASA worm font by Ray Larabie 1997, NASA graphic adaptations made from the NASA Insignia (public domain). Earth & Moon imagery captured in Systems Tool-Kit, copyright to their respective owners.