WSU students’ ‘space Winnebago’ wins NASA competition

By Joseph Kleinsasser

A team of nine WSU aerospace engineering students took the top award in a national NASA competition for their design of a Mars exploration vehicle. The WSU team triumphed over student teams from some of the premier engineering colleges in the country.

The Human Exploration of Space-University Partners competition, sponsored by the Lunar and Planetary Institute and the NASA Johnson Space Center, this year focused on preparing for the human exploration of Mars as early as 2011. Teams were asked to address the details of building and operating an outpost on Mars. Their mission included considering specific designs and analyzing systems that would allow people to move around, communicate with each other and transport supplies.

The WSU team of Danny Ball, Brian Hullinger, Souhail Khallock, Ryan Laughton, Janna McKenna, Maggie Nguyen, Clark Owens, Renaud Rebours and Nathan Romine starting designing what they came to call the "space Winnebago" in September. Gawad Nagati, associate professor of aerospace engineering, was the project’s faculty adviser. During the yearlong competition, the team also had the opportunity to work with NASA engineering mentors.

In May, the final 12 teams went to NASA’s Johnson Space Center near Houston to present their results to the NASA team currently working on the Mars exploration program.

The Wichita State team won with their project "Design of a Long Range Martian Exploration Rover." The long-range pressurized rover design was based on an advanced composite material cylindrical shell. It was designed to carry two or three people in a shirtsleeve environment while traversing more than 1000 kilometers on the surface of Mars.

The Wichita State team defeated teams from Cornell University, University of California-Berkeley, University of Southern California, University of Maryland, Arizona State University, California Institute of Technology, Georgia Tech University, University of Houston, University of Texas, University of Texas-San Antonio, Texas A&M University and Metropolitan State College.

"We are always proud of our students when they take on the challenge of going head-on with the elite engineering schools in a national competition," Walter Horn, chair of the aerospace engineering department, said. "When we win the competition, and we have been fortunate to win a number of times, we are overjoyed. It helps confirm the fact in our minds that we have an aerospace engineering program and a group of engineering students at WSU that can compete with any in the country."