TOPEKA, KAN. – Today, NASA announced the winner of the NASA Exploration Design Challenge. Among the five finalhigh school teams was Team Erion from Erie High School. Last month, the group of four female students from Erie High School advanced to the final round to build and test designs for radiation shields for NASA’s new Orion spacecraft.  

“These students deserve a huge congratulations,” said Congresswoman Lynn Jenkins (KS-02). “Erie High School and the State of Kansas are incredibly proud of their achievements. They were competing against our nation’s brightest young engineers, that had more funding and more resources, but with hard work and ingenuity they stood out over 100,000 entries to become one of five finalists. It is truly inspiring to follow stories like this coming from Eastern Kansas, and I am particularly pleased to see this was an all-female team in a field that is currently dominated by males. I challenge them to not let their ideas and creativity end this week and continue to be a role model for all of us.”

Items to Note:

• Out of 127,000 initial entries submitted worldwide, only five teams were selected by NASA engineers to move on to the final phase of the competition.

• The high school teams were asked to design shielding to protect a radiation component for the Orion spacecraft. Today, NASA engineers at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va, picked the winning design, which will be launched into space on Orion later this year. This flight will be the first spaceflight test of the capsule that will one day carry astronauts to an asteroid and Mars. 

• The announcement was made at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, at the USA Science and Engineering Festival. 

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