Colorado Springs based college students watch mold experiment launch into space
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KRDO) - A Friday space launch was more than a year, and a couple of days, in the making for a group of University of Colorado-Colorado Springs and Pikes Peak State College Students.
A black mold experiment created by that group of students was on board the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket when it took off for the International Space Station (ISS) on Friday.
"If [the black mold's] more efficient at taking away a lot of the toxins for plants to grow, that means we can quickly establish agriculture on the moon, on Mars," Tristian Dwyer, a UCCS student who worked on the experiment, said.
PREVIOUS COVERAGE: Space mold! UCCS and Pikes Peak State College students sending experiment to space
Thousands of student groups from across the globe submitted their experiments, and only a select few made the cut to go to the ISS.
That accomplishment was only slightly dampened by poor weather, scrapping the first two launch attempts earlier this week. Some of the students who were in Florida earlier in the week for the launch couldn't extend their stay and had to watch it on video from the UCCS lab, where they spent hundreds of hours working.
"We tried to watch the first two attempts of this launch to happen. Both were canceled by weather," William Shimel, a recent UCCS graduate who worked on the project, said.
"It's still super cool that we're going to actually launch something that's going to be on the International Space Station," said Evan Martin, another UCCS student who worked on the project.
Dr. Lynnane George, Dr. McKenna Lovejoy, faculty from UCCS and PPSC, respectively, and Cody Leeper, a Pikes Peak College student, were all able to stay and watch the launch in person.
"[The] feeling at launch was this visceral experience. It's not just your viewing of it; you could feel it in your bones, and it was just so exciting and so surreal to know you see it disappear up above and know that your research went to space," Leeper said.
Now it's time for the waiting game; the space shuttle should reach the ISS by the end of the weekend. Then the astronauts will need to conduct the group's experiment, but it could take more than a month for the zero-gravity mold to come back down to 6,000ft.
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