To Student Flight Experiment Teams for SSEP Mission 3, and Student Proposing Teams for SSEP Mission 4, we’d like to invite you to get into the spirit of this remarkable adventure.
We are now at T-Minus 47 days from liftoff of the SSEP Falcon I payload, containing 5 Mission 3 experiments, 1 re-flight experiment from Mission 1, and 1 re-flight experiment from Mission 2, aboard Soyuz 35S launching in May 2013 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. We are now at T-Minus 173 days from the liftoff of the SSEP Falcon II payload of 12 additional Mission 3 experiments, and the SSEP Orion payload of 11 Mission 4 experiments aboard SpaceX-3 launching in September 2013 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station near Kennedy Space Center in Florida. And FYI – we are about to announce Mission 5 to ISS, the sixth SSEP flight opportunity in less than 3 years.
To all teachers, administrators, and the 21,700 students that have been engaged in microgravity experiment design and proposal writing since program inception in June 2010; to the 280+ Local Partner organizations from government, corporate, and academic sectors – including 28 Space Grant lead institutions – that have embraced SSEP at the community level to inspire and engage the next generation of scientists and engineers; to our National Partners: the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, NASA Nebraska Space Grant Consortium, and Subaru of America, that have provided remarkable resources for the SSEP National Program, here is something to get us all in the spirit of what we have done together.
Your world from the International Space Station, from videos taken by the astronauts aboard ISS. (watch it in HD, full screen if you can.)
Giacomo Sardelli’s Further Up Yonder
Michael König’s Earth, Seen from ISS Expeditions 28 and 29 | 2011
The Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP) is a program of the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education (NCESSE) in the U.S., and the Arthur C. Clarke Institute for Space Education internationally. It is enabled through a strategic partnership with NanoRacks LLC, working with NASA under a Space Act Agreement as part of the utilization of the International Space Station as a National Laboratory. SSEP is the first pre-college STEM education program that is both a U.S. national initiative and implemented as an on-orbit commercial space venture.
The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), Carnegie Institution of Washington, NASA Nebraska Space Grant Consortium, and Subaru of America are National Partners on the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program.
