Ever dreamed of taking your selfie game to new heights — literally?
The out-of-this-world idea of incorporating selfies in space secured one Virginia Tech team first place at the national Astranis Students for the Exploration and Development of Space Satellite-II competition. Founded in 1980, Students for the Exploration and Development of Space is the largest student-run space nonprofit organization in the world that empowers young people to participate and make an impact in space exploration.
The team from Virginia Tech, inspireFly, won for its ContentCube project, a unique and personalized space experience that includes a selfie-stick that captures pictures of an external LCD screen in space and incorporates images submitted by the general public.
“As we brainstormed ideas, we wanted to get the general public excited and make the experience of space, local,” said Ben Strickler, team lead and a senior majoring in aerospace engineering. “Very few people have ever had the chance to gain access to space. We saw an opportunity to give them that personal connection by appealing to younger generations through our selfie project while also testing a new technology in the space environment.”
The undergraduate student team’s proposal was hailed by the judging panel for the novelty of its concept and its technical approach of testing LCD screens in space. Once developed and launched into space, users would submit a photo to the ContentCube website. The photo would then be uploaded to the satellite via the Virginia Tech ground station, taken with a camera on a deployable boom and routed back to the ground station again. The result is a selfie taken in space with Earth as the backdrop, available to anyone.
Kickoff for the project began a year ago at a conference where interested teams had the opportunity to attend a workshop on designing, building, and integrating a CubeSat for low Earth orbit.
Thirteen chapters from across the country entered the competition and submitted proposals. Proposals were judged on engineering design, nontechnical development and support of the design, professionalism of proposal, novelty of the proposed CubeSat mission and demographic makeup of the design team.
The inspireFly team is comprised of more than 50 undergraduate students from across the College of Engineering, College of Science and the Pamplin College of Business and is advised by a team of researchers and faculty at the Center for Space Science and Engineering Research, or Space@VT. The team will be seeking sponsorships and begin building and testing their ContentCube and will see it launched to the International Space Station via Nanoracks in the next two to three years.
– Written By Jama Green
