# Student Spaceflight Experiments Program

The Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP) provides an opportunity for student groups from upper elementary school through university to design and fly microgravity experiments in low Earth orbit (LEO). SSEP is a program of the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education (NCESSE, a project of the Tides Center), the Arthur C. Clarke Institute for Space Education, and the private space hardware company NanoRacks. SSEP operates under a Space Act Agreement between the sponsoring organizations and NASA, allowing the International Space Station (ISS) to be utilized as a national laboratory.

## History

The program was launched in June 2010, by NCESSE in the U.S. and by the Clarke Institute internationally. As of 2018, SSEP has sponsored fourteen missions to LEO – two on board the Space Shuttle, and twelve to the ISS – with a thirteenth mission to the ISS announced in March 2018, and expected to fly in the spring/summer of 2019.
In the first fourteen SSEP flight opportunities, 86,800 students in grades 5 through 16 (senior undergraduate in the U.S. higher education system) participated in experiment design and proposal writing. Of 18,759 proposals received, a total of 240 experiments were selected for flight, with one from each community participating in each flight opportunity. As of 14 August 2017, 206 of these experiments have been successfully launched. The 18 experiments comprising Mission 6 to the ISS were lost when the Cygnus CRS Orb-3 vehicle exploded shortly after launch on 28 October 2014.

### Key dates

| Date | Event |
| 01 Jun 2010 | Program start |
| 16 May 2011 | STS-134 launch (Endeavour) |
| 08 Jul 2011 | STS-135 launch (Atlantis) |
| 22 May 2012 | M1 launch (SpaceX-D1) |
| 07 Oct 2012 | M2 launch (CRS-1) |
| 18 Sep 2013 | M3a launch (Orb-D1) |
| 09 Jan 2014 | M3b/M4 launch (Orb-1) |
| 13 Jul 2014 | M5 launch (Orb-2) |
| 28 Oct 2014 | M6 launch (Cygnus CRS Orb-3 failure) |
| 10 Jan 2015 | M6 launch (CRS-5) |
| 28 Jun 2015 | M7 launch (CRS-7 failure) |
| 08 Apr 2016 | M7 launch (CRS-8) |
| 18 Jul 2016 | M8 launch (CRS-9) |
| 19 Feb 2017 | M9 launch (CRS-10) |
| 03 Jun 2017 | M10 launch (CRS-11) |
| 14 Aug 2017 | M11 launch (CRS-12) |
| 29 Jun 2018 | M12 launch (CRS-15) |
| 25 July 2019 | M13 launch (CRS-18) |
| 06 Dec 2020 | M14A launch (CRS-21) |
| 03 Jun 2021 | M14B/M15A launch planned (CRS-22) |
| 18 Aug 2021 | M14C/M15B launch planned (CRS-23) |
| 26 Nov 2022 | M16 launch (CRS-26) |

## Process

The competition to select student projects for flight is designed to resemble a standard research proposal process. Interested groups must submit proposals in response to announced criteria; these proposals are then peer-reviewed against the criteria in a two-stage selection process, with the vast majority of proposals rejected.
Each selected experiment is provided with one mini-laboratory, which is flown on the ISS and then returned to Earth for analysis. Experiments selected for flight have included research into crystal growth, composting, cell division, seed germination, and calcium metabolism. The cost of each experiment is on the order of US$24,500, which must be raised by the community developing the experiment.
Students have an opportunity to share their research at a national conference sponsored by the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, NCESSE, and the Clarke Institute. Students participating in the program have also been given the chance to participate in a videoconference with space station astronauts.