Student Spaceflight: Watch Live This Weekend

NASA’s Student Spaceflight Experiment Program (SSEP) enables students across a community the ability to design and propose real experiments to fly in low Earth orbit on the International Space Station (ISS). This weekend, SpaceX launches the first official resupply mission to the ISS to be broadcast as it happens on Livestream with SSEP experiments on board.

Space history will be made this Sunday, October 7, as SpaceX Dragon attempts its first commercial cargo resupply mission to the station. On board will be 23 microgravity experiments designed by students. Twelve of the experiments were delivered to the space station on a SpaceX demonstration mission in May, but were not completed. The other 11 experiments are new.Designed by students, the experiments hope to study the effects of microgravity on physical, chemical and biological systems. The 23 experiments represent more than 7,000 students and almost 2,000 proposals. Another suite of experiments is scheduled for Spring 2013.

Livestream coverage begins at 7:55 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday, October 7, 2012.

This is not the first time student experiments were launched into space. The 1974 spaceflight of Skylab included observations of student experiments and the enabling of the Earth Resources Experiments Package as we see in this video:



[Flickr photo by chatarra picks]