18-Year-Old Indian Boy Wins NASA ‘Moon’ Prize For Proposing An Elevator From Earth To The Moon

An 18-year-old teenager from Indian city Chennai has recently won an award from the American space agency. A student of British International School, the young boy called Sai Kiran P bagged the NASA "Moon" prize for proposing an elevator from Earth to the Moon to facilitate human settlement on the lunar surface.

The teenager came second in the grade 12 category of the NASA Ames Space Settlement Contest, 2017. The annual contest is organized by NASA Ames Research Center, the National Space Society (NSS) and San Jose State University. The competition got entries from all over the globe and was valid only for students up to 12th grade who had to design proposed human settlements on Earth’s natural satellite.

According to Sai Kiran P, it is possible to construct elevators between the Earth and the Moon in a cost-effective way. The teenager’s winning entry titled “Connecting Moon, Earth and Space’ and ‘HUMEIU Space Habitats,” explained how to transport humans to the Moon and settle them there. According to a News Nation report, the 18-year-old student had been working on this project since 2013.

"The first segment of the project is about creating elevators that could transport humans and cargo to the Moon so that humans can form their settlements there,” Sai Kiran P was quoted as saying by MensXP. “The most important aspect was that of gravity as without gravity, humans won’t be able to settle there.”

The prize winning student also added that he wants to construct elevators between the two bodies because his basic idea is to save on the monetary costs that can be incurred while sending humans to the Moon on rockets. Sai Kiran P also suggested that the proposed elevators could be either Earth-based or lunar-based.

The teenager’s proposal about a human settlement on the lunar surface also includes the ideas of setting up agriculture, governance, entertainment and recreation there. Incidentally, 138 students of different grades from India have bagged awards in various categories in the contest, apart from Sai Kiran P.