SSEP Program Costs

NOTE: This is a sub-page of the About SSEP main page.

You may want to read the About SSEP main page first—it describes how we can aggressively help you find underwriting. We found underwriting for 37 of 50 SSEP community programs undertaken as part of the four SSEP flight opportunities to date: the final two Space Shuttle flights (STS-134 and STS-135) and SSEP Missions 1 and 2 to ISS. The About SSEP main page also provides an excellent and comprehensive program orientation.


The SSEP Program Costs detailed below are for the following SSEP flight opportunities: SSEP Missions 1, 2, and 3 to the International Space Station (ISS).

We are making SSEP available as a Baseline Program that provides for breadth of programming at the lowest possible cost. The Baseline Program provides: the Flight Experiment Design Competition for up to 3,200 students; all Teacher and Student Proposer Resources; the flight of one Mini-Laboratory reserved for your community and containing your community’s experiment selected for flight; and the majority of the Community Program elements. The Baseline Program can then be augmented with Supplemental Program Options allowing the community to broaden SSEP as they see fit.

Baseline SSEP Program Cost: $19,950


1. Program Elements

B — Baseline Program
S — Supplemental Program Option

a. Mini-Laboratory Slot (see Designing the Flight Experiment page)

b. Community-wide Flight Experiment Design Competition (see Flight Experiment Design Competition page)

  • B — ongoing Program Assistance for the community leadership and teachers
  • B — SSEP acceptance of 3 Finalist Proposals from the community, for each reserved Mini-Lab Slot
  • B — Step 2 Review of Finalist Proposals: processing, selection, feedback, and showcase

c. Teacher and Student Proposer Resources (see Resources page)

    • B — ongoing Technical Assistance for student teams and teachers across the community
    • B — National SSEP Website (this site): rich in content and program resources
    • B — FAQ
    • B — Document Library: containing documents on programming, experiment design, and proposal submission

d. Community Program (see Community Program page)

  • B — SSEP National Blog, providing up-to-date news and information on SSEP
  • B — SSEP Community Network Hubsite, an online gathering spot to explore all activities across the participating communities
  • B — Student Team Clips archived at YouTube
  • B — customized SSEP Community Blog (see, e.g., Portland, OR, Crown Point, IN, and Chicago, IL); and an aggregated Community Blog Stream from across the Community Blogs
  • B — SSEP Weekly Tweet-up
  • B — Student Voices of Mission Control
  • B — Mission Patch Design Competition, and flight of winning Mission Patch
  • B — Blog on the Universe Curricular Content (see example), and SSEP Showcase (see example)
  • S — National Team Delivery of Community-wide Journey through the Universe Programming, potentially including:
    • Classroom Visits for up to 4,000 grade K-16 students
    • Family/Public programs for the community
    • awards to student teams
    • Professional Development for educators
  • S — SSEP National Conference in Washington, DC (see 2011 Conference page; a registration fee may be required for all attendees)


2. Cost of Supplemental Program Options

Community-wide Programming by the National Team (see Community Program page): including, Classroom Visits to potentially thousands of students, Family/Public Programs, and Professional Devleopment for educators.

Cost: the cost is dependent on the scope of the program desired. The program can be customized to fit both audience size and budget. Contact SSEP.

SSEP National Conference in Washington, DC (see Community Program page): the community would be responsible for any conference registration fee per attendee, if such a fee is required

Cost: the cost of a conference registration fee would be based on total projected attendance obtained through a survey of SSEP participating communities. NCESSE is committed to keeping the fee as low as possible, and will also explore securing a national underwriter to eliminate the registration fee entirely. It should be noted that for the 2011 and 2012 Conferences, no registration fee was required.

Expanding the Number of Students Participating in the Design Competition: a school district may want more than 3,200 students to participate in their experiment design competition.

Cost: to assess the added cost, based on what you have in mind, Contact SSEP.

Purchase of Additional Fluids Mixing Enclosure (FME) Kits: the Baseline Program includes a package of 5 FME Kits. Each Kit allows assembly of a flight certified FME ready for loading of experiment samples, sealing, and shipping to Houston for incorporation into the SSEP Payload scheduled for flight to ISS. The FME Kits can be used to assess the operation of the FME mini-lab, design and refine experiments, prepare an FME for flight to ISS, and conduct formal ground truth experiments while the flight experiment is ongoing.

Cost per additional Package of 5 FME Kits: $350 (includes shipping)

Reserving Additional Mini-Laboratory Slots: this option allows a community to fly 2 (or more) mini-labs, hence 2 (or more) experiments. One approach might be to conduct one competition for a slot reserved for grades 5-8 and one for a slot reserved for grades 9-12, so that middle school students are not competing directly with high school students. 
The community submits 3 finalist proposals for each additional mini-lab slot.

Cost per additional Mini-lab Slot: $12,000


3. Other Costs Borne by the Community

Experiment samples (fluids and solids): the cost of the experiment samples to be used in the student experiments.

Shipping Costs: cost of FedEx for: 1) the community to send the flight-ready FME to Houston for integration into the SSEP Payload; 2) the community to send their Mission Patch(es) to NCESSE, and the return of the Mission Patch(es) after the flight; and 3) NanoRacks to send the FME to the community, after return to Earth, if a community representative does not travel to Houston for pickup.

Step 1 Review Board: all costs associated with meetings of the community’s Step 1 Review Board, and associated activities.

Travel Costs to DC: all travel costs for students/teachers traveling to the National SSEP Conference in Washington, DC.


Return to About SSEP main page?

The Student Space Flight Experiments Program [or SSEP] is undertaken by the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education (NCESSE), a project of the 501(c)(3) Tides Center, in partnership with NanoRacks, LLC. This on-orbit educational research opportunity is enabled through NanoRacks, LLC, which is working in partnership with NASA under a Space Act Agreement as part of the utilization of the International Space Station as a National Laboratory.