SPACE SETTLEMENT
DESIGN TOURNAMENT (SSDT)
When: Fall 2025
Location: Virtual Event
How do you build a lunar mining settlement? what does it take to build an outpost on mars?
If these questions interest you, you might be interested in a one-of-a-kind experience available now to high school students in South Texas.
The Space Settlement Design Tournament invites high school students to learn the nitty-gritty of conceptualizing, planning, and pitching plans for future space exploration. The tournament, modeled on and developed in conjunction with the internationally famous Space Settlement Design Competition®, offers students unique insight and expertise into one of the fastest-growing industries in the world, commercial space. It is the only sanctioned tournament of its kind in South Texas.
How It Works
Participating students are divided into four teams, each of which is led by a working professional in the space industry who serves as “CEO.” The teams collaborate to develop business plans for companies as though they were competing for a space settlement request for proposal (RFP). Over four days, each team works furiously to prepare detailed proposals, which they present to a panel of judges, including current and former NASA executives involved with the agency’s engineering and technology transfer operations. The judges then select the winning proposal.
““I was not entirely sure what a career in space looked like—especially as a sociology major. I had not yet learned how to collaborate across disciplines. The tournament gave me the closest experience to seeing what my path could be. The space industry is still a blank page; we have just written our names and the date. Now we get to decide what comes next.””
