SLU Students Can Join Project to Send an Experiment to the International Space Station
Saint Louis University undergraduate students are invited to join a fall learning challenge to send a science experiment to the International Space Station as part of Mission 22 of the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP). SLU’s experiment will be flown to the International Space Station, along with others from around the country, in summer 2027.
The project is open to all undergraduate students at SLU. Teams of 3-5 students will be formed by Sept. 1 and will work together to design a microgravity experiment in the science discipline of their choice.
Small teams of undergraduates will identify a research question to be addressed through a microgravity experiment in low Earth orbit and develop their own proposals. A SLU-selected team of reviewers will choose three proposals to be forwarded for review by NCESSE, and one of those will be awarded a flight on SSEP Mission 22 to the International Space Station.
SSEP provides each winning program with the flight of one microgravity research mini-laboratory; one SLU experiment will be integrated into the mini-lab and launched via a cargo flight to the ISS.
Due to the nature of the mini-lab and safety restrictions on operating these experiments in orbit, SSEP research focuses on the effects of microgravity on materials, chemical, and biological processes.
The chosen experiment will launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Astronauts aboard ISS will operate the experiment for 4-6 weeks before it is returned to Earth for each team to finish analysis.
Principal Investigator Michael Swartwout, Ph.D., professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering, encourages any interested SLU student to attend the initial meeting.
“You don’t have to have an idea yet, you just have to be interested and say I might want to do this,” he said. “The idea can come later.”
Students can come in as a team or come to the initial meeting looking to be placed with others. Swartwout said he thinks each team should have someone who is curious about science, someone who can dream big, and someone who can pull the elements together in a proposal.
He noted that this is student-led, from idea through final proposal.
“It’s a different mental exercise than when you do a project in class,” he said. “There, the instructor already knows the answer to the question being posed. Here, we are asking students to think about a research question they would like to ask and design an experiment and proposal around it.”
The SSEP has a nine-week development window to produce a highly constrained science project to be conducted by astronauts aboard the ISS. Swartwout noted the speed of the challenge – from proposal to actual launch – is meteoric for aerospace research.
“The fun part is they will be able to see this go to the ISS in the spring,” he said. “That is astonishingly fast for space.”
Project Timeline
- Sept. 1- Nov. 3 – Experiment Design and Proposal Writing Phase
- Dec. 18 – Selection of Flight Experiments
- Late spring 2027 – SpaceX launch of experiments to the ISS
- Summer 2027 – Return flight to Earth
- July 2027 – Presenting findings at SSEP National Conference
Each team will have a faculty advisor. At the end of the nine-week challenge, the SLU teams will present their work to a team of SLU faculty and alums for review.
“This is a great opportunity for undergraduate students to get a professional research opportunity,” Swartwout said. “They will work like they would if they were working in industry and create a professional proposal to pitch their experiment.”
Experiments are designed to real-world engineering and technology constraints imposed by the flight-certified mini-lab that must be used, and the nature of flight operations to and from Low Earth Orbit.
Student Spaceflight Experiments Program
The Student Spaceflight Experiments Program [or SSEP] is a program of the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education (NCESSE) in the U.S. and the Arthur C. Clarke Institute for Space Education internationally. It is enabled through a strategic collaboration with Rhodium Scientific, America’s first commercial space biotech company. SSEP is the first pre-college STEM education program that is both a U.S. national initiative and implemented as an on-orbit commercial space endeavor.
Research reported herein was supported by the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, Inc. and NASA under agreement number 80JSC018M0005 and with Rhodium Scientific under agreement number UA-2021-8282.