Student Spaceflight Experiments Program
education outreach and spaceflight program
The Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP) provides an opportunity for student groups from upper elementary school through university to design and fly microgravity experiments in low Earth orbit (LEO). SSEP is a program of the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education (NCESSE, a project of the Tides Center), the Arthur C. Clarke Institute for Space Education, and the private space hardware company NanoRacks. SSEP operates under a Space Act Agreement between the sponsoring organizations and NASA, allowing the International Space Station (ISS) to be utilized as a national laboratory.
History
The program was launched in June 2010, by NCESSE in the U.S. and by the Clarke Institute internationally. As of 2018, SSEP has sponsored fourteen missions to LEO – two on board the Space Shuttle, and twelve to the ISS – with a thirteenth mission to the ISS announced in March 2018, and expected to fly in the spring/summer of 2019.
In the first fourteen SSEP flight opportunities, 86,800 students in grades 5 through 16 (senior undergraduate in the U.S. higher education system) participated in experiment design and proposal writing. Of 18,759 proposals received, a total of 240 experiments were selected for flight, with one from each community participating in each flight opportunity. As of 14 August 2017, 206 of these experiments have been successfully launched. The 18 experiments comprising Mission 6 to the ISS were lost when the Cygnus CRS Orb-3 vehicle exploded shortly after launch on 28 October 2014.
Key dates
Process
The competition to select student projects for flight is designed to resemble a standard research proposal process.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Student Spaceflight Experiments Program” as education outreach and spaceflight program. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as education outreach and spaceflight program. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 26, 2022. The linked authority identifier is Q18249734. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2010, 2018, 2019 and 2017.
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This entry incorporates text from “Student Spaceflight Experiments Program” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.