Student teams from five New York City public schools are currently competing in the Intrepid Museum’s first-ever Intrepid International Space Station Challenge (I2S2C), a program created in partnership with the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP) and the Ramon Foundation.

For the first time in the New York City public school system, 195 students will compete for a chance to send a microgravity experiment of their own design to the International Space Station (ISS), where an astronaut aboard will conduct the experiment. After approximately six weeks in orbit, the experiment will be returned safely to Earth for data collection and analysis.

The program kicked off on February 10 with an event at the Intrepid Museum. Students are currently working on their experiment designs, which they will present at a private event at the Intrepid Museum on April 27. The winning project will be announced in May and sent to the ISS this fall.

The participating schools are Brooklyn Science and Engineering Academy (Brooklyn); Institute for Collaborative Education (Manhattan); PS/IS 30 Mary White Ovington (Brooklyn); IS 204 Oliver Wendell Holmes (Queens); and the Urban Assembly Institute for New Technologies (Manhattan). The judges for the competition include Terry Hart, former NASA astronaut and professor of Mechanical Engineering at Lehigh University; Matthew Pearce, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies; Dr. Maxine Lubner, Vaughn College; Eric Boehm, Aviation Curator at the Intrepid Museum; and Michael J. Massimino Ph.D, Columbia University and retired NASA astronaut, who also serves as the senior advisor of space programs at the Intrepid Museum.

“We are thrilled to provide such a wide range of New York City students with the opportunity to participate in this extraordinary challenge,” said Lynda Kennedy, vice president of education at the Intrepid Museum. “This project combines the resources of the Museum with SSEP’s rigorous approach to science research and the Ramon Foundation’s dedication to personal and social excellence to inspire innovation in our city’s students.”

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