Before reading this page, make sure to read the SSEP Home page for a program orientation.
1. Introduction
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—middle and high school students (grades 5-12), and/or undergraduates at 2-year community colleges (grades 13-14)—the ability to design and propose real experiments to fly in low Earth orbit, first aboard the final flights of the Space Shuttle, and then on the International Space Station.
For school districts—even individual schools—SSEP provides an opportunity to implement a systemic, high caliber, and historic STEM education program tailored to community need.
Each community participating in SSEP conducts a local Flight 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 in low Earth orbit. A suite of SSEP program elements—the Community Program—leverages the flight 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.
Critical Timeline: once a community joins the program, teachers can begin using SSEP content resources for classroom introduction of the science conducted in a microgravity environment, and the design approach for microgravity experiments using the SSEP mini-laboratory. Students then move on to experiment definition and design, and write proposals for their experiments. From program start to submission of proposals runs at least 8.5 weeks, but may be extendable to more than 12 weeks. Each SSEP Flight Opportunity has its own Critical Timeline which defines all milestones and deadlines.
2. Program Pedagogy
The SSEP paradigm derives from the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education’s Core Beliefs, its embraced Learning Community Model for science education, and its heritage of delivering community-wide programming. SSEP is designed to be flexible enough to address a community’s unique strategic needs in STEM education, to be delivered systemically across a school district, and to be sustainable. The design of SSEP also embraces the heritage of student spaceflight experiments enabled by Instrumentation Technology Associates’ (ITA) Student Outreach Program conducted on earlier Shuttle missions.
When designing SSEP, we had our pedagogical approach to STEM education in mind. SSEP empowers the student as scientist, and within the real-world context of science that is far more than exploration through inquiry. SSEP allows student teams to design an experiment like scientists, with real constraints imposed by the experimental apparatus, current knowledge, and the environment in which the experiment will be conducted; it allows students to propose for a real flight opportunity like professional scientists, bringing critical written communications skills to bear; it allows students to experience a real 2-step science proposal review process; it allows students to go through a real flight safety review like professional researchers; and it provides students their own science conference, where they are immersed in their community of researchers, communicating their thoughts, ideas, and experimental results to their peers. Science is more than a way of thinking and interacting with the natural world. Science is more than a book of knowledge. Science is also a complex social landscape filled with challenges, and the need for multi-faceted and successful communication with ones peers. SSEP is about introducing real science to our next generation of scientists and engineers.
3. The Flight Experiment Design Competition
SSEP makes use of mini-laboratories that NanoRacks, LLC, schedules to fly in low Earth orbit. Each laboratory has enough experiment slots for up to 90 experiments to be conducted simultaneously. NanoRacks makes the mini-laboratory available to professional research communities in government, academia, and industry; to universities for student training; and to the SSEP for pre-college (grades 5-12) and 2-year college (grades 13-14) programs. SSEP secures multiple experiment slots for each flight opportunity.
Each community participating in the SSEP, and conducting a competition, will be provided at least one slot to fly an experiment. A community can also decide to underwrite more than one experiment slot.
But the goal is not just flying a few dozen student experiments—it’s ensuring that these experiments result from experiment design competitions at the local level, and each competition potentially engaging an entire school district. It is about leveraging science education. It is about immersing hundreds of classrooms in the process of experimental design, and student ownership in learning.
Student Teams participating in the Flight Experiment Design Competition submit short, well-crafted, formal proposals that are written to criteria defined in the SSEP Flight Experiment Proposal Guide. Proposals go through a 2-Step review process, with the participating community assembling a Step 1 Review Board of local area educators and researchers, and which selects 3 finalist proposals to be submitted to the SSEP National Step 2 Review Board.
Read the details regarding the Flight Experiment Design Competition.
4. The Experiment Design Experience
Student teams across your community propose experiments designed to assess the impact of 10-14 days of microgravity (weightlessness) on a physical, chemical, or biological system.
Students can design experiments in diverse fields, including: seed germination, crystal growth, physiology of microorganisms and life cycles (e.g. bacteria), cell biology and growth, food studies, and studies of micro-aquatic life (e.g., Planaria Worms). Content resources for teachers and students support foundational instruction on science in microgravity and experimental design. Skype and webinar training by SSEP staff are also available.
Each experiment must be designed to work within an existing, flight-ready, easy-to-use, professional research mini-laboratory such as the Materials Dispersion Apparatus (MDA), which is specifically designed to combine separate sample materials once in orbit. The MDA has a heritage of supporting successful student experiments on previous shuttle flights.
Each experiment loaded into the mini-lab consists of one to three samples (fluids and/or solids, e.g., seeds and a 2% sugar solution) that are located in what are effectively small test tubes. The experiment is begun in orbit when an astronaut operating the mini-lab causes the test tubes to be brought together, mixing the samples.
The sample (fluids and/or solids) used in the student experiments must be safe, and pass a real NASA Flight Safety Review (see Section 10 below.)
Read the details regarding Designing the Flight Experiment
5. The Community Program
The Student Spaceflight Experiments Program is also about fostering a community-wide celebration of the human capacity to explore, the nature of exploration, and the joys of learning. We have created a suite of program elements and resources that immerse your entire community in the local spaceflight experiment design competition. This includes a SSEP Community Blog just for your community where students and teachers can provide continuous reporting on activities from design competition and flight experiment selection, to the flight aboard the Space Shuttle or International Space Station, data retrieval, data analysis, and reporting of experiment results (see, e.g., the Ballston Spa, NY, Community Blog); weekly Tweetups with professional space engineers and scientists; Student Voices of Mission Control via Twitter providing continuous coverage of the flight; a design competition to design a Mission Patch to fly along with the community’s experiment, and which is returned after the flight; and a National SSEP Conference held in Washington, DC, where your students formally present on their experimental designs and teams flying experiments report on their results, nationally recognized scientists and engineers are featured speakers, and attendees are treated to tours of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.
SSEP also provides the ability for your community to host—for up to a week—a National Team of scientists and engineers from research organizations across the nation. They talk to potentially thousands of students–one classroom at a time–providing firsthand experiences about what it’s like to do research on the frontiers of exploration, and an understanding of the educational path they took to the frontier. The Team also conducts family and public presentations on compelling topics in the space sciences and spaceflight. The venues for these presentations also provide the opportunity for the community as a whole to honor all the classes that proposed experiments, and to bestow awards for participation in the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program. Programming by the National Team can also include a 1-day workshop for teachers customized to local curricular need, and capable of addressing a variety of topics, including: use of inquiry-based learning in the classroom, science in microgravity, and experimental design.
Read the details regarding the Community Program
6. A Program Customized to Your Community
The SSEP is available for pre-college students in grades 5-12, and undergraduates at 2-year community colleges (grades 13-14) but a community can choose to make the competition grade level specific, e.g., just 8th grade, or just grades 9-12. The Baseline Program reserves one experiment slot in the mini-laboratory for your community, but additional slots can be reserved if you want to: 1) hold separate but simultaneous competitions e.g., one at the middle school level and one at the high school level, or 2) hold a single competition which provides for more than one experiment to fly.
The Community Program resources such as the web-based and social media resources, and the optional National Team visits to classrooms, presentations at family and public events, and professional development workshops for teachers, are tailorable to the grade level(s) your community chooses to engage through SSEP. The SSEP philosophy of approach is to provide flexible resources so that a community can customize the program to their needs. This is not our program it is your program.
To get a sense of how the 16 communities participating in the STS-134 opportunity have customized SSEP to their strategic needs in STEM education, visit the Community Profiles page at the SSEP Community Network Hubsite.
7. Size of a Participating Community and Appropriate Lead Organization
You are free to define the size of your community as you see fit. It can be a single school district of any size, or multiple school districts working together—which is a great model for a rural area. It can even be a single school. An appropriate lead organization in the community might be a school district(s), a museum or science center, or some other educational institution.
8. Implementing SSEP Across Your Community—To School Districts, Schools, and Science Teachers
Your community competition will likely be coordinated at the school district level, with the science (or STEM) office briefing secondary science teaching staff across the district, or briefing a corps of lead science teachers who can then take the program back to their schools. A participating community will designate a SSEP Community Program Director who oversees a SSEP Local Team charged with formally carrying out the program. The SSEP National Team (us) is available for conference calls, or Skype videoconferences for program briefings. Such conferences have provided a community’s Local Team a formal grounding in the program, a sense of community-wide ownership, a common starting point, and a venue to ask questions. These conferences have been exceedingly successful in getting the 16 communities participating in the STS-134 opportunity aboard and moving.
It should be noted that science teachers at middle school, high school and community college levels across the U.S., and across multiple science disciplines, have already effectively engaged their classes in designing and proposing experiments to fly aboard STS-134. SSEP is a proven program. In fact, there were 447 student team proposals submitted, with 293 forwarded to the communities’ Step 1 Review Boards. 43 finalist proposals were then submitted to the National SSEP Step 2 Review Board for selection of the 16 experiments to fly—one for each participating community. Read about the Selected Experiments for STS-134 at the SSEP Community Network Hubsite. Also read the media coverage of SSEP experiences across the Community Network on the SSEP In the News page at the Hubsite.
We also recommend seeking out an interdisciplinary, advisory group of local area researchers that you can convene to help students and teachers think about experiments, react to experimental design concepts, and also serve on your Step 1 Review Board. You might even consider having this researcher advisory group provide a panel discussion on experiment design for your community, and one that can be taped and archived. If you need help identifying researcher advisors, and you don’t mind folks that *might* not be local, we can assist. SSEP thus provides a wonderful opportunity to put in place a formal relationship between local area educators and researchers.
9. Implementing Experiment Design in the Classroom
The community is free to decide if SSEP should be implemented in the classroom, during out-of-school time, or some combination of both. It is also up to the community to decide the acceptable size of a student team proposing an experiment, e.g., a class of students, a small group of students, or an individual student. But each proposal must have a designated Teacher Facilitator who is charged with guiding students on the team through the experiment design process, and serving as an editor on the proposal. A teacher can serve as Teacher Facilitator to multiple student teams.
For implementation of SSEP in the classroom, we have assembled a suite of Teacher and Student Proposer Resources, which includes: this SSEP Website; ongoing Technical Assistance (via contact information on the Contact page) for questions on experimental design, timeline, and submission, which in turn feeds a FAQ; and a Document Library that includes documents providing student proposers with basic information on the science one might undertake in microgravity, case studies of experiments suitable for the mini-laboratory, and all information required to write and submit a proposal. An additional resource—To Teachers, How to Move Forward—is a straightforward, step-by-step recipe for how to bring SSEP into the classroom, and get students moving on experiment design.
We invite students in participating classrooms to truly slip on the shoes of the researcher and propose and design experiments just like professional scientists and engineers—experiments designed to the spaceflight hardware to be utilized, and constrained by NASA requirements. One cannot imagine an education program with greater potential to engage students in the process of scientific inquiry, and get them thinking about a career in not just spaceflight, but across all science and technology disciplines.
Read the details regarding the Teacher and Student Proposer Resources
10. Constraints on Fluids and Solids to be Used in the Experiments, and Mandatory Flight Safety Review
Each student experiment must pass a NASA Flight Safety Review (a review by NASA toxicology)—which just means that the fluids and solid materials to be used in the experiment—the Experiment Samples—must pass the review. To this end, student experiments will only be able to make use of fluids and solids listed on the Master List of Experiment Samples. It is an extensive list that includes samples that have previously flown in the MDA and other similar mini-labs, and have therefore passed prior flight safety reviews. The Master List also includes additional non-toxic samples, and non-toxic categories such as “various vegetable seeds”. Use of samples on this list ensures a very high probability of passing review. The Master List of Experiment Samples is found in the Document Library.
Three months in advance of launch, SSEP must give NanoRacks a list of the sample materials associated with the experiments selected to fly. NASA will likely provide a formal ruling 30-45 days after the list is submitted—which is the point when a student team will know if their experiment has been formally given the go-ahead for launch.
For the student experiment selected for flight, the student team can continue ‘tweaking’ their experiment sample concentrations with NASA through ITA until approximately 30 days before launch—but only in terms of reducing the concentrations. And the team has no ability to introduce new samples from the Master List.
The milestones for Flight Safety Review are part of the Critical Timeline associated with each flight.
11. The SSEP Cost Model and How We Can Help You Find Funding
Commercial spaceflight is a business, and for the Nanoracks’ payload of research mini-labs to fly requires NanoRacks to secure paying customers for the lease of experiment slots and all launch services. Our non-profit National Center for Earth and Space Science Education (NCESSE) created SSEP as a national STEM education program based on the availability of these experiment slots. The Center is a customer of NanoRacks, and books multiple experiment slots for SSEP. In addition, the Center’s staff delivers all aspects of SSEP to the participating communities. All SSEP activities are therefore associated with real costs, and the Center must charge a participating community—but on a strictly full cost recovery basis.
SSEP currently has no national sponsors to underwrite any program costs. To participate in SSEP, a community must therefore identify underwriting, and it is appropriate to secure funds from both the public (e.g. local, state, and federal education grants) and private sector (e.g., community-based foundations, businesses, and philanthropic organizations.)
But we can help! The Center is committing significant resources to help communities find underwriting for every SSEP flight opportunity. And we’re successful at it. We found funding for 11 of the 16 communities participating in the SSEP opportunity for STS-134. We can help your community identify funders, even talk to them on your behalf if you wish; we can help you tune your request to a funder’s underwriting requirements; we have a good proposal template if needed, with a track record of success; we have developed a set of appropriate talking points when approaching a funder; and we have a good track record for securing funding rapidly.
12. Program Cost
We recognize that SSEP needs to be flexible enough so its scope at the community level can be tailored to fit community size. We have received requests from both large and small school districts—even individual schools—that wanted to participate in the STS-134 opportunity. We have found that the smaller communities have the toughest time securing the needed underwriting. As a benchmark, in the U.S. there are nearly 14,000 school districts, 12,000 of which are small with less than 5,000 enrolled students,
We also recognize the significant challenge to all communities in securing underwriting in the current financial climate. In this regard, please know that we are committed to aggressively help you find funding.
We are therefore making SSEP available as a Baseline Program that provides for breadth of programming at the lowest possible cost. The Baseline Program reserves for your community an experiment slot in the mini-lab scheduled to fly, provides the Experiment Design Competition for up to 3,200 students, provides all Teacher and Student Proposer Resources, and provides 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.
The Baseline Program includes:
- one Experiment Slot reserved for your community in the mini-laboratory scheduled for flight
- the Flight Experiment Design Competition, but limited by the community such that no more than 3,200 students are provided the opportunity to participate. Expanding student participation is a Supplemental Program Option.
- all Teacher and Student Proposer Resources
- all Community Program elements with the exception of: 1) the community-wide programming for students, teachers, families ,and the public delivered by a National Team of scientists and engineers (this is costed as a Supplemental Program Option, with the cost reflective of the scope of program required); and 2) the National Conference in Washington, DC, which will require a registration fee per attendee.
Baseline SSEP Program Cost: $19,950
Read the details regarding SSEP Program Costs
YOUR NEXT STEP: go to the How to Participate page to read about the current SSEP opportunity available for your community and how to explore your participation in the program.
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