By Eleanor P, Year 10 Journalist Lead

When  nine NHEHS students arrived at Imperial College in late November, we had low hopes that we would return 4 months later to take part in the national finals of the UK Space Design Challenge. However, our team Olympus Mons Trading Company won our regionals, which booked our ticket to the weekend-long final round (well, apart from ISSDC – you’ll see) of the most exhilarating engineering competition in the country.

UKSDC is entirely unlike anything I’ve ever done before. For the uninitiated, it is an industry simulation competition in which ‘companies’ made up of teams of around 60-70 from many different schools design space settlements to a brief – and all in less than 24 hours. Each company has an area for everyone, from designing the actual settlement in structural engineering or working out how to keep its inhabitants healthy and happy in human factors. Last time, we were creating a settlement on Mars, but since this was the national final the complexity was turned up to 11 as we were tasked with delivering a proposal for a mining settlement in the Asteroid Belt, named Astoria by the fictional Foundation Society.

A more difficult Request for Proposal meant we spent more time on this project than the one we did at regionals: 7 hours became 21, if you include the whole night (which some people definitely worked through – thankfully we got to go home!). It seems that one of the unofficial rules of UKSDC nationals is ‘the presenters are allowed to sleep’, which was a good thing as everyone else was drifting off by the presentations from 9:00 am on Sunday morning. (My friends and I found this quite ironic as much of our time at these competitions has gone into researching good circadian rhythms, the body’s internal sleep schedule.) The aim of all this work? To earn a coveted spot on the UK team competing at Florida’s Kennedy Space Centre in the summer at ISSDC – the International Space Settlement Design Challenge. 

On Saturday morning, some presentations from the ‘CEOs’ got the weekend started, and were followed by splitting into companies and holding elections. Hard work ensued, including, according to a human factors colleague/good friend, ‘arguing with the boys from operations’ and ‘attempting to calculate the plumbing costs’. Many developments from all departments and the occasional major revelation from Structural (we were in fact spinning, and walking on the inside of a ring – that one took a while to digest) would come up in the following hours until the arrival of a quantity of Domino’s pizza so large I do wonder what they think at Domino’s HQ each time there’s a UKSDC. After pizza, we said our goodbyes and went home, preparing ourselves for a night of hard work (even though most of it had seemingly been completed during the day) while the majority of the company stayed on in South Kensington.

The next morning opened with some more presentations from UKSDC alumni, before the main event: the proposals from the 4 teams to the Foundation Society panel. There were a couple of those legendary questions from the judges that make everyone go ‘ooh’ and feel glad they’re not answering it, but they didn’t make the presentations any less well-considered or impressive, especially when you considered some of the amazing engineering and maths that had gone into them in such a short period of time.

After a short break, it was time to do one of the things UKSDC does best: celebrate talented team members. Each group of CEOs nominated some people to be recognised for their exceptional contribution, whether it be to CAD designs, team morale or innovative thinking. After that started the always unnecessarily long build up to the announcement of the overall winners. Although in the end EAI did not come out victorious, we could all hold our heads high, as the problem solving and teamwork we had all displayed was an achievement in itself – and the prospect of getting selected for Team UK was still open to everyone, not just the winning team!

In all, I loved taking part in UKSDC this year. It is wildly different from anything else offered at this age as it truly is an industry simulation, helping you learn a wide range of workplace skills, from communicating clearly to organising large tasks. Of course, there is also some impressive academic and creative work that allows a settlement to be raised from the ground in a short length of time. It’s a slightly frenzied gathering of some really amazing, intelligent, kind people, who are thrown together for a day or so but definitely form bonds that will last much longer – no wonder the group chat lives on!