Preparing the leaders of the new generations who will live on other planets
Everyone in Israel has heard of Mitzpe Ramon, the Negev’s driest and scariest place. There, the expression “lunar landscape” takes on a very real shape. It is home to the training facility for the future masters of SpaceIL. Houses with strange architecture provide homes for the participants. All they are supplied with is water. Their space food is in tubes. Participants learn to grow most of the produce they need by irrigating plants with cleansed waste water. The electricity comes from solar panels. The suits they wear outside the station have their own cooling or heating system. While the conditions are “cosmic”, gravity cannot be abstracted. The participants work on different programmes.
According to Vered Cohen-Barzilay (one of the top 35 leaders of an international educational project on space innovation and entrepreneurship according to a UN ranking), children need to be attracted to space research at an early age. Sometimes students’ ideas provoke scientists to tackle unexplored problems.
