Watch the 2016 winners accept their award
It has been 7 years since the UK has been part of the winning company. Congratulations to them all!!!! Especially since the management of the company was in the hands of our UK students.
After almost having to force the team to sleep last night, today they were up bright and early to head back to the Kennedy Space Centre to continue their work on the space station which aims to lay the groundwork for terraforming Mars. The team have been working hard all day and are still hard at work whilst this entry is being written in the small hours of the next day.
The team have worked so hard and are well on their way to designing a station of which they should all be very proud.
We wish the best of luck to the team as the deadline steadily approaches!
We began the day with breakfast, after which we went to the Kennedy Space Center – which was a surreal experience to know that we were actually here, and to see the scale of the rockets. We then had our introduction, briefings and heard from Chris Ferguson, an astronaut who piloted the Space Shuttle Atlantis.
In our companies, we then elected our management team with the following UK Team members gaining positions in Rockdonnell (with the UK having a clear majority over these positions):
President – Victoria Farrant
Vice-President of Marketing/Sales – Matthew Braz
Director of Structural Engineering – Natasha Cowan
Director of Human Factors – James Drummond
Director of Operations – Jacob Robertson
Also, Jonathan Heywood (EU team – from UK) is President of Grumbo.
All companies have spent the day working on their proposals, and are looking forward to doing more tomorrow.
Today, we went to the town of Celebration – created by Walt Disney as the ideal ‘American town’. This was a really useful experience for the competition itself, as it provided an opportunity to get a feel for the type of settlement we might be designing. It was also very interesting due to a game of ‘Assassin’ which we attempted to play – and never finished.
We then arrived back to the hotel to meet our company members (whilst waiting hours to check into our rooms – much to Louis and Helen’s dismay and despair). In this time, we began to get to know our team members ready for the competition tomorrow.
The UK team is in Rockdonnell with American, Chinese, Pakistani and Indian teams.
The Western Europe team is in Grumbo with American, Indian, Welsh, and Uruguayan teams.