COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — An experiment by three students and Pikes Peak State College is expected to launch in early November. According to Blake MacDonald, one of the students who worked on the project, it changed his life forever.
"It's defined my career. It's defined my educational path," MacDonald said. "When I started my educational career at PPSC, I was a history major at the time."
In November, MacDonald and his two project partners get to send their experiment to space.
"Once we got accepted, I was like wow, this is an amazing opportunity," MacDonald said.
His project is one of 37 aboard Student Spaceflight Experiments Program's Mission 18. Since 2010, it's been giving students the chance to test out their experiments in low gravity.
"It will really help our campuses continue to support students in engineering and all the STEM fields, because they can come from any background," said PPSC's Engineering Department Chair McKenna Lovejoy.
The project is a chemical reaction that may help scientists grow food in space. Depending on how Macdonald's experiment goes when it reaches the ISS, there could be big implications.
"As we continue through space travel, we're going to need to find new ways to manufacture in space," MacDonald said.
According to the SSEP website, Mission 18 was supposed to take flight in September. It says the new launch date will be sometime in November.
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