SUPPORT SPACE EXPLORATION

SEARCH’s mission is to promote human spaceflight and space exploration through the interdisciplinary collaboration between students and faculty here at Purdue University, and that continues to be our goal in organizing these analog astronaut programs, which allows students to go to remote habitats and simulate being an astronaut.

We hope to prepare students with the necessary skills and resources to become astronauts. We aim to do this by providing opportunities to participate in student analog astronaut programs at no cost to the participants, but we need your help!

WHY DO WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT? 

By donating to our program, you are directly aiding our team in our mission to promote and support human exploration initiatives at Purdue! All costs will go towards funding students to send to analog astronaut programs at no cost to them, which will also open the opportunity for a more diverse array of students to apply and attend. We appreciate you and your contributions to forwarding space exploration research here at Purdue.

Students participating in SA2TP.

WHAT ARE OUR SPECIFIC PROGRAMS?

SEARCH is only 1.5 years old, yet we have already been able to make an impact here at Purdue through our Student Analog Astronaut Training Program (SA2TP). This program is completely student-led and takes place right here in West Lafayette. We have been organizing it for a year now, with our second crew of students being selected for this May. It provides students with all the skills they need to be an analog astronaut on Earth through working on health, fitness, teamwork, and more. 

Moving forward, we are continuing to push Purdue forward as the “Cradle of Astronauts” by collaborating with the Hawai‘i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS). We will be sending our first crew there this summer, and 2 to 3 Purdue graduate students leading up to this summer. The facility is fitted with all the tools to be an astronaut, with spacesuits, a greenhouse, and more, that our crew will do research with, and with no contact with the outside world.

Over this semester, a team here at SEARCH will plan SA2TP. In total, 10 students will participate in SA2TP, and 8-9 students will participate in HI-SEAS. After both programs are run during this summer, we will be organizing a series of outreach events throughout the 2024-2025 academic year to allow a broader audience of Purdue students and faculty to join in on the discussions these programs are starting. Furthermore, we hope to continue the research conducted in bioastronautics and hydroponics (two important things needed ina real space mission for crew health) at HI-SEAS by incorporating it into several of our other projects at SEARCH.