Lexie and Shreya's Space Settlement Contest mission

Hi - our names are Lexie and Shreya and we are two students from St. Dominic's College secondary school in Cabra, Dublin.

This year we entered an international space settlement design competition run by NASA. As part of this competition we designed our own space settlement colony where up to 10,000 humans can live in space!

We are delighted to announce that we have won 1st prize in this competition! Over 26,000 students from all over the world competed and it is a phenomenal achievement to have been awarded first place in the whole world!

We will be very proud to represent our school, our community and Ireland if we can present own winning project in person at the International Space Development Conference in Florida this June.

We named our project Inis Beatha, which means Island of life. We have designed a colony that will be self-sustainable with the aid of space plants, genetically bioengineered to survive and thrive in a harsh space environment. We plan to use space plants to provide the colonists with essential resources such as food, clean air, clean water and to provide biofuels, bioplastics and pharmaceuticals.

We are so proud to represent Ireland as first place winners in this fabulous international STEM competition; we are excited to use this opportunity to promote women in STEM and we hope that we will be leading the way for other students to follow in our footsteps.

The International Space Development Conference (ISDC) will take place in Orlando from June 19th to June 22nd, 2025. If we can raise the funds to attend this conference we will collect our award, present our project in person and engage in workshops with their peers from around the world. Previous attendees at this event have included, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and the event is attended by Space Industry leaders and NASA scientists and engineers.

Our fundraising now begins to allow us to be able to travel to this conference! We are asking for your support - please make a donation to our fund to make our dreams come true...

Thank you from the Irish Space Settlement Team,

Lexie, Shreya, Ms. Dockery and Ms. Healy.