My name is Alyssa Urbina and I am excited to talk about my experience with Go For Launch! along with how me and my team(TARs) feel about having the amazing opportunity of creating our own unique experiment to be sent to the International Space Station. I attended the Midland, Texas 2022 Winter Go For Launch! event with 2 of my close friends Cat and Ulisses. This was truly one of my favorite things I participated in throughout my high school years and I walked away from the event with even more passion for space exploration than before.
It was always very rare for me to find any peers with this similar interest in space so being able to spend those 2 days with others who had that same interest was a special experience. It was also very interesting to hear all the stories from an astronaut who had been on multiple missions to space and I learned some very fun facts. All the activities I participated in throughout the event were fun and also educational; it is because of those activities that I learned how to better work with a team to reach different goals whether it be landing a “spaceship” (a stuffed animal named “Perry the STEM Falcon”) or battling another team to knock down towers made of cups with makeshift catapults using spoons and plastic eggs.
All the activities required me to learn how to come up with creative solutions to reach different goals while working with a team. The most exciting and educational part of the event was definitely creating an experiment idea especially since we had the chance of our experiment being able to actually be conducted in space. Creating our experiment expanded our understanding of the engineering process and showed us there were many obstacles that needed to be overcome to make a working experiment idea that had a chance of solving some kind of problem experienced in microgravity.
All throughout the research process there were many problems we came across that we had to find a way to work around given the constraints; this for sure sharpened our problem solving and critical thinking skills. When it came to presenting our idea I think we had executed it very well. I usually am not too fond of presenting in front of people but throughout the event I feel as though everyone gained some very valuable knowledge on how to better speak in front of people and being able to see everyone else’s unique presentations and ideas made it easier to feel confident in our own ideas.
It was so interesting to see all the other teams present and see how unique, creative, and thought out their ideas were. Overall, Go For Launch! was both extremely fun and educational and my team and I are so excited to have been chosen and given this opportunity to have our experiment be created and sent to the International Space
Station to be conducted. I will never forget my amazing experience with Go For Launch! and I'm so grateful for it.
Written By – Alyssa Urbina
