SSEP Community Network

Welcome to the SSEP Community Network Hubsite

We believe that learners must see themselves in the stories we tell, and
experience scientific exploration through their own involvement.

We also believe that it takes a community to educate a child…
and a network of communities to reach a generation.

News Milestones from the SSEP National Blog—

April 29, 2012: NEW FLIGHT OPPORTUNITY—Mission 3 to ISS for Fall 2012  Go to Post
Watch: Video Clip describing SSEP        Download: Press Release PDF
Download: 3-page Program Overview (MS Word)

3/13/12: SSEP Honored to Welcome 11 Communities Aboard Mission 2 to ISS Go to Post
1/5/12: SSEP Mission 1 to ISS Experiments Selected to Fly in March 2012 Go to Post
11/15/11: Communities Accepted for Mission 1 to ISS, NEW Mission 2 Opportunity Go to Post
7/14/11: NASA Honors SSEP Communities Flying on STS-135 Go to Post
5/27/11: Selection of SSEP Flight Experiments for Final Space Shuttle Flight Go to Post
5/27/11: NASA’s International Space Station Program Office Showcases SSEP Go to Post
5/16/11: Endeavour Blasts off with Aspirations of Thousands of Student Scientists Go to Post
4/27/11: Student Spaceflight Experiments Program is featured by NASA at nasa.gov Go to Post
For all news, Jump to the National Blog

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Use the Subscribe Box at the bottom of the right column.
 

Space Shuttle Discovery, STS-133, Rolls Out to the Launch Pad, November 21, 2010 CLICK FOR ZOOM

On this SSEP Community Network Hubsite you can learn about the 40 communities across the U.S. that are taking part in the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP) and the over 200 organizational partners at the local level.

Note this Hubsite is a separate web environment from the SSEP Main Website which is where you’ll find a detailed overview of the SSEP, how to participate, and all the needed programmatic resources. The Hubsite is where we celebrate the communities—the thousands of students, their teachers, and their families—engaged in this remarkable adventure on the high frontier.

All Hubsite pages are directly accessible from the navigation banner at the top of this page. Here you can read Community Profiles for each participating community, explore the Experiments Selected for Flight, and see the student-designed Mission Patches that accompanied the experiments into orbit. At this Hubsite you can also explore the In Our Own Words page if you’d like to hear from participating students, teachers, and district administrators, and can read the SSEP In The News page for extensive media coverage of the program. You can also follow along with SSEP activities across the Network via the Community Blog Stream, where all the posts from across the Community Blogs, and from the SSEP National Blog, are aggregated into a single stream of posts.

Think of this Hubsite as the Grand Central Station for all the students, teachers, families, and communities engaged in SSEP—a program that was designed to be a keystone initiative for U.S. National STEM education, and to inspire America’s next generation of scientists and engineers.

A Quick Program Overview

The Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP), launched June 2010 by the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education in partnership with NanoRacks, LLC, is a remarkable U.S. national Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education initiative that gives up to 3,200 students across a community—upper elementary, middle, and high school students (grades 5-12), and undergraduates at 2-year or 4-year colleges and universities (grades 13-16)—the ability to design and propose a real microgravity experiment to fly in low Earth orbit, first aboard the final flights of the Space Shuttle, and then on the International Space Station (ISS). It is about immersing and engaging students and their teachers in real science—on the high frontier—so that students are given the chance to be scientists—and be inspired. More broadly, SSEP is about a commitment to student ownership in exploration, to science as journey, and to the joys of learning.

Each participating community holds a microgravity experiment design competition with student teams vying for an experiment slot reserved just for their community in a real research mini-laboratory scheduled to fly. A suite of programs leverages the flight experiment design competition to engage the entire community, embracing a Learning Community Model for STEM education, and allows the experience to be celebrated with national, even global audiences.

Flight Opportunities to Date

There have been four SSEP flight opportunities to date: SSEP on STS-134 and SSEP on STS-135 — the final flights of Space Shuttles Endeavour and Atlantis; and SSEP Missions 1 and 2 to ISS. For all four flight opportunities combined, 40 communities joined the program, providing 87,000 grade 5-14 students across 265 schools the opportunity to design and propose real spaceflight experiments. Thus far, 9 communities have participated in two flight programs, and one community has participated in three.

Some milestones:

Through SSEP on STS-134 and SSEP on STS-135, 977 student team proposals were received, and 27 experiments have flown—one for each community. Read about the Selected Flight Experiments for the final flight of Shuttle Endeavour (STS-134) and Shuttle Atlantis (STS-135) … and be amazed.

The third SSEP flight opportunity, Mission 1 to ISS, includes 12 participating communities. A total of 779 student team proposals were received, and 15 selected for flight. The Aquarius payload of SSEP Mission 1 experiments is scheduled to fly to ISS in Spring 2012 aboard SpaceX Dragon—the first commercial spacecraft to dock with ISS, heralding in a new era in human spaceflight. Read about the Selected Flight Experiments for Mission 1, and the historic nature of the flight.

The fourth SSEP flight opportunity, Mission 2 to ISS, began on March 5, 2012 with 11 participating communities. The Antares payload of SSEP Mission 2 experiments is slated to fly to ISS in Fall 2012.

April 2012: NEW FLIGHT OPPORTUNITY ANNOUNCED
SSEP Mission 3 to ISS
The fifth flight announcement of opportunity—for SSEP Mission 3 to ISS—provides for an experiment design competition Fall 2012, and a ferry flight to ISS in Spring 2013. Mission 3 to ISS is open to school districts and schools across the U.S. (grades 5-12); 2-year community colleges and 4-year colleges across the U.S.; communities in the U.S. led by informal education or out-of-school organizations; and international communities in European Space Agency (ESA) member nations, European Union (EU) member nations, Canada, and Japan, through the Arthur C. Clarke Institute for Space Education—the new international arm of the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education.

Intrigued? Visit the SSEP Main Website for full program details, or Contact Us.

The Current Network—
The map provides the location of the 40 communities that have participated in the four SSEP flight opportunities to date, and which comprise the SSEP Community Network. Thus far, nine of these communities have participated in more than one SSEP flight opportunity.

The table below provides links to the Community Profiles for each community, and links to all active SSEP Community Blogs where teachers and students report on their local SSEP program activities.

Communities Listed in Orange Text Below have participated in more than one SSEP Flight Opportunity

STS-134 Participating Communities

STS-135 Participating Communities

Mission 1 to ISS Participating Communities

Mission 2 to ISS Participating Communities

NOTE: Individual community blogs will be linked as they are made active

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 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.

All content on this website is Copyright 2012, National Center for Earth and Space Science Education (NCESSE). Any use of this content without the permission of NCESSE is prohibited.