Student Spaceflight Experiments Program
| Founder(s) | Jeff Goldstein, director, NCESSE |
|---|---|
| Established | June 2010 |
| Mission | STEM student outreach |
| Head | Jeff Goldstein |
| Key people | Stacy Hamel, National Program Manager Drew Roman, Technology Manager Harri Vanhala, Science Advisor Tim Livengood, Science Advisor Michael Hulslander, Education Advisor |
| Website | http://ssep.ncesse.org/ |
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.
The program was launched in June 2010, by NCESSE in the U.S. and by the Clarke Institute internationally. As of 2015[update], SSEP has sponsored eight missions to LEO – two on board the Space Shuttle, and six to the ISS – with a seventh mission to the ISS announced in April 2014, and expected to fly in the spring of 2015.
In the first eight SSEP flight opportunities, 48,900 students in grades 5 through 15 (junior undergraduate in the U.S. higher education system) participated in experiment design and proposal writing. Of 7,922 proposals received, a total of 114 experiments were selected for flight, with one from each community participating in each flight opportunity. As of 15 October 2014[update], 96 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.
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