It was an exciting week as the Rocket City Space Pioneers (RCSP) invited fourth graders from all over the state of Alabama to help us name our lunar lander in the “Name our Lander” Contest for a chance to win an out-of-this-world trip to Space Camp®. On Tuesday, appropriately on the anniversary of the Explorer 1 launch, we held a press conference at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center® with a room full of state and local officials, team members, media, and students. It was an exciting, inspiring event!

We partnered with the Alabama Department of Education and the Alabama Tourism Department to engage fourth-grade students in Alabama Public Schools to get excited about going back to the Moon, learning about RCSP’s mission, and being a part of history.

At the event, we were privileged to hear inspiring words from Dr. Tommy Bice, superintendent of Alabama Schools; Dr. Casey Wardynski, superintendent of Huntsville City Schools; Tommy Battle, the mayor of the City of Huntsville; Edith Parten, communications director for Alabama Tourism; Dr. Deborah Barnhart, CEO of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, and Tom Baumbach, president of Dynetics. We also had a very special host/MC, Homer Hickam, the original “Rocket Boy.”

The Huntsville Center for Technology, one of our teammates and also the high school technical center for Huntsville City Schools, built a full-scale Engineering Development Lander (EDL) for RCSP that is high fidelity and very detailed.  We unveiled it at our event, and the crowd was quite impressed. We wanted to show what our lander for which we need a name will look like.

The students have also built a rover and a moonscape which will allow us to do testing. We are very proud of these students, and they are a good example of applying learning to real-life projects.

As part of the promotion of the contest, we will visit a few schools throughout the state and do rocket engine firings and talk to students about our mission and about the importance of going to the Moon and space exploration in general. We wish we had the time and resources to visit every school in Alabama and share our vision and try to inspire them to study science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Not only with the winning class get a three-day Pathfinder trip to Space Camp, but the teacher will receive a $500 gift card for classroom supplies.

We will announce the winner of our contest in early March. We are anxious to see what ideas the students come up with.