SSDC History

SPACE SETTLEMENT DESIGN COMPETITION

SSDC HISTORY

Your attendance at a Space Settlement Design Competition is part of a long history of Competitions involving thousands of students and teachers.

The first Competition was held in Columbus, Ohio in 1984 as part of the Boy Scouts’ National Exploring Conference. Anita Gale, her husband, Dick Edwards, and friend Rob Kolstad developed the concept and the intellectual materials and content.

Subsequently the Boy Scouts’ Space Exploration Post at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, CA decided to sponsor a local competition. It was called SpaceSet, and the first Competition at JPL occurred in 1986, and continued for 18 years.

A National Competition was founded in July, 1994, as part of Space Week International, and was held in Washington, DC, to great success. The National Competition moved to Epcot Center in 1995, and then to the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in 1996. It continued at KSC through 2005 and then moved to the Johnson Space Center (JSC) where it has occurred each July since 2006. The National Competition is now called the International Space Settlement Design Competition and is attended by student groups from around the world, including the United States.

The first JSC Competition was organized in the spring of 1999 at the request of the JSC Center Director, and has continued at JSC since that time. There has been a JSC SSDC in the March time frame each year, and for two years there were two session in the spring to accommodate additional students. Beginning in 2012 there will again be two Competitions – one in March, 2012, and a second in October, 2012.

For three years we also sponsored a Competition at the NASA White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico. It is no longer offered.

The initial focus of the Competition was on Mars Exploration – a base in orbit about mars, on the Martian surface, or a cycling resupply vehicle to travel repetitively between Earth and Mars to resupply existing assets at Mars. The Competition has now expanded its focus to include designing large human facilities in the inner solar system, including Earth’s Moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and the Asteroid Belt.

There is now also an on-line Competition that any school in the world can enter and compete for an opportunity to attend the International Space Settlement Design Competition at JSC each July. A subset of the members of the winning company from a JSC Competition is invited to return to JSC in July to participate in the International Competition.

In recent years the JSC Competition has focused on attracting students from Texas and Iowa, via an agreement with the Iowa Education Department. The expansion of the JSC Competition to two annual sessions allowed us to expand our scope in 2012 to include students from Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa, New Mexico, and Colorado.