Resources and Tips

• Avoid entries longer than 50 pages.
• If your entry is longer than 5-10 pages, consider including a one-page executive summary on the best features of your entry. Be sure to include original ideas, major focus, and any parts particularly well done in the executive summary. This will help the judges find the best parts of your entry.
• Avoid including material not directly related to your space settlement or settlement-related issue. This is a space settlement contest, and marginally related material will make it difficult for the judges. If they can’t find your space settlement elements easily, you won’t score well.
• Refer to the Space Settlement Home Page
• Refer to the NSS Space Settlement Journal, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal on all aspects of space settlement.
• Refer to Free-Space Settlements by Al Globus.
• Refer to the NSS Space Settlement Library
• Refer to the head judge’s advice.
• Use the space settlement teacher’s page.
• Refer to the NSS Library.
• Refer to the Generic Earth Orbiting Space Settlement Requirements by Anita Gale.
• Do your best to get the science right.
• Make your design as quantitative as possible.
• Include a bibliography. We want to know where you got your ideas and materials. Better: use proper references, including image credit.
• Be creative. Surprise the judges. Put something of your own personality into your work.
• Consider designing a settlement that you would really like to live in.
• Consider alternate possibilities and clearly describe why you made the choices you did.
• Present your material clearly and neatly.
• When you discuss someone else’s ideas or work, which almost all entries do, reference it. We recommend a reference format of {author year}. For example, you might write: Small children may not be allowed in the center of the cylinder since radiation levels are minimized near the hull [Horia 2005].
• Then in the References section at the end of your paper, put the following: [Horia 2005] Horia Mihail Teodorescu and Al Globus, “Radiation Passive Shield Analysis and Design for Space Applications,” SAE 2005 Transactions Journal of Aerospace.
• Have fun.

To learn about orbital space settlements, consider reading The High Frontier: an Easier Way by Tom Marotta and Al Globus.