Space & Space Resources

Colorado School of Mines, in partnership with Lockheed Martin Space, announce a new global student design challenge open to student teams from any accredited university worldwide.

A team of Colorado School of Mines students have received funding from NASA to design and test a near-term solution to one of the biggest (smallest) challenges to future lunar exploration: Moon dust.

A Colorado School of Mines graduate student is developing a new lunar payload that could be deployed to otherwise inaccessible areas of the Moon.

Researchers at Mines, Honeybee Robotics, NASA’s Johnson Space Center and Pioneer Astronautics will build and demonstrate hardware to produce oxygen and steel from lunar regolith.

"If we can build this thing, we’ll be able to have unlimited access to the shadowed regions of the Moon," said Ross Centers, a student in Mines' Space Resources Program.

The new programs draw from the core areas of expertise Mines is known for — from civil and environmental engineering to extraction to materials science — to create an interdisciplinary field of study that prepares students for the next step in their careers.

Even a tiny shard of paint in orbit can do damage to a spacecraft. The Mines Capstone Design team will launch their suite of experiments into suborbital space in August 2020 as part of the RockSatX program.

Claire Thomas, one of 40 members of the Brooke Owens Fellowship Class of 2020, will spend 10 weeks working at Made in Space, a company developing manufacturing technology for space, and receive mentorship from aerospace industry veterans.

Team DREAMR – short for Drilling Rig for the Exploration and Acquisition of Martian Resources – is the fourth Mines team in four years to qualify for the one-of-a-kind collegiate aerospace competition.

Team CLOVER's winning design was a collapsible 3D-printed wheel that would act almost like a “Ferris wheel of test tubes.”