MMW Habitat Design Contest at SGC 2007

What sort of design were we looking for? for what kind of enviorment?

I wanted to push the discussion about our main goal a bit further. For details on the technical issues about the habitat itself please go to the Habitat Design Issues Folder.

We want you to think about how we could best achieve our goal – involve the broad public in an annual habitat design competition and raise public awareness for the lunar exploration initiatives.

What are your ideas? What kind of competition do you think we need? What should our strategy be? Hand out handicrafts paper models? Distribute PowerPoint presentations? And to who? Kids in High School, students in University, people on the street? What do we ask the people to send to us?

What should our outlines for the competition be? What are the rules? Who do we tell about it, and how do we do it? What's our outreach strategy? How do we spread the word about our competition?

How shall we achieve our goal? It's up to you. Please let us know so we can work together and decide on the best strategy so that our project will succeed. Let's go!

mabe thats whats going on with us
if we desighn one together
then we win the contest and we can have the sgc/sgac logo on the finnished product
i bet we're in competition with the major space agencies
so lets use the common free programns to do the desighn toghether
we should bring specialized fields
a 3d graphic artist for visual
now these have physics engines for them also
like blender with python scripting
so, we have a physical desighn
then someone researches the elements found on the moon at the proposed landing site
then from there we see what we can use for the mason
aspects ofit (ie concrete, cave sealing ideas)
if we fing the right elements we can make cement
that would be very useful
then we have a fung shuei expert desighn the habitat for
peace of mind mixed with usefullness, like Akiyo had in fukuoka
you know the plants on the hallways and stuff
eccep[t like berries and fruit trees,
etc.
then we wopuld need a structural engineer that could do the conversions from earth gravity to moon
and fing the neccesary structural limits that would have to be taken into consideration
then we need a mettalurgist to define how we will get the said minerals from the moon, and make it into usefuls materials ( iron ore is only part iron)
then we need to define the air locks
assuming the pouros natue of the moon has no ability to hold and atmoshere in a pillar and column situation
which then connects to the mason, cement and sealing works good on earth
but then to calculate how this could be integrated without and atmoshere at first (cement has to dry to set), and water freezing is not dry,

ideas?
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one kind word can warm 3 winter months
japanese proverb

As the main aim of the contest is to involve as much of the public in this competition (as Ricardo said, not just technical experts) and raise awareness of space exploration initiatives, then the idea of having different categories is good. In fact, rather than judging each design for each category, we could have them running in parallel. As mentioned by Marcia, these could include the cover architecture, engineering ideas and cost effectiveness (or perhaps general business proposals). This would get as many people involved as possible involved. If you have a cool engineering idea, you could just submit that without worrying about the architecture of the base. Having a weighting factor based on the age of the participant is a great idea and won't confine the participant demographic to the older generation.

If we want to get the public as interested as possible, perhaps we should have the submitted ideas open to be viewed by anyone. Therefore, we could have a general website where participants would upload their ideas under each category. To give people as much creative freedom as possible, I don't think we should have any restrictions on how much material they submit. Maybe, just have examples already uploaded to give them and idea of what we expect. And we should not expect too much so that as many people as possible will get involved. Another idea for the website would be to have links on it to information about habitat designs, space initiatives and how one could get involved in the space industry etc. as that is really one of our major aims.

The competition probably should be annual otherwise it would be too much work. To give the competition real clout, we need to get experts in. Perhaps we could ask our partner, The Planetary Society, or other space advocate groups to provide these. Perhaps the UN would also help with this and we could always ask NASA and ESA as well as other governmental agencies to support us as part of their public outreach programs.

On that topic, we could also ask the space advocate groups to spread the news of the competition to their members on their mailing lists as well as aim at involving school and university students somehow.

With respect to the prize, it should be something worthwhile to most people. Perhaps we could offer the winner of each category a private consultation with a professional of the space industry about their career prospects in the industry as well as about their design along with integration into the SGC design team. And perhaps, an all expenses paid trip to the award ceremony at the next IAC would be enough in itself! We will get great ideas coming in that hopefully not only we will be able to use.

Just a quick idea for this project.

When I was in junior highschool my english teacher had us do somthing very similar to this. It was a NASA sponsered event and the idea was to have students write up a short report describing what their space station colony would look like. Some groups drew nice pictures to go with the reports or made models and took pictures of them.

I think there are multiple advantages to this approach. First - we work to convince TEACHERS to include this in their teaching plans. We could present this to both english, writting, and science teachers. We would then create a website with some general information about the moon. It would include varying degrees of information based on age. So for an example it could talk about the fact that gravity on the moon is less than gravity on earth and then explain to the students exactly what that means. We could talk about people having to have 'shade' from the sun instead of getting into radiation. I could go on but I think you get the point. This way in order for them to write their paper with their ideas, they'll have to read up and learn about the moon. Thus accomplishing a goal before they even submit anything!

Then we name prizes and make certificates. Because these would be primarily school projects it probably would not be appropriate to give out real prizes, but a variety of awards would be easily printed with winners for various categories. These winners would then be posted on the website (to some kids this could be considered a prize in and of itself)

sorry for the very long response but I think we'd be best to present this to teachers in elementary through highschool. This group of students would be very impressionable and still has the ability to dream without 'reality' limiting them.

let me know what you all think

-brad

I see a lot of people have brainstormed their ideas for the project, but have we started putting together a requirements for Proposal for people to respond to for the competition? Are there any rough drafts/documents of what is being discussed?
If not has anyone planned to do so?
-Kavya
~!I Don't Want to be one in the crowd; I want to be One Above the crowd!~