L'SPACE stands for Lucy Student Pipeline Accelerator and Competency Enabler.
It is a workforce development academy under NASA. Anyone who is studying at a US university can apply to be a part of this academy, however, it is very competitive. Within the academy, there are two branches: MCA which is the Mission Concept Academy, and NPWEE which is the NASA Proposal Writing and Evaluation Experience Academy.
In NPWEE, each team works with one or two NASA employees, and together the entire team undergoes training in Proposal Writing as well as Evaluation. We get trained on how quad charts are made for ideas, the rules and regulations involved in patenting the work, and how teams at NASA function to achieve the big goals. There are thousands of proposals submitted to NASA.
How does NASA decide which one to select? There's limited funding after all, but each proposal achieves something interesting. Selecting the best one, and getting the right funding, is not a cakewalk.
Therefore, during NPWEE, we get specialized training on how the proposals are evaluated for the final mission selection, and the scoring criteria; the knowledge of which cannot be found on the internet. The best proposal during this academy gets funding of $10,000 to build a prototype of their proposal. Other proposals and quad charts go into the NASA database for future prospective missions.