A Capsule of Teamwork: Senior Owen Andrews developed a capsule for NASA HUNCH

There’s a trio that meets at the Center for Academic Achievement five days a week for more than two hours each school day — nearly fifty hours per month. 

Meet the NASA HUNCH dream team. The self-picked team earned this title because they’re “focused and innovative,” according to Renee Chambers, their CAA engineering teacher, and they’re the only NASA HUNCH finalist group in the class. 

Senior Owen Andrews is the “manager.” SM North senior JR Phimmachanh is the “innovator.” SM Northwest senior Sang Son is the “doer.”

And now they’re solving NASA’s engineering problems.

Their problem of choice? Design a container to aid astronauts in safely transporting baseball-sized moon rocks back to Earth. 

“At the beginning of the year, we picked a project to work on,” Andrews said. “The project we chose is through NASA, and they gave students the opportunity to solve a problem that NASA is currently dealing with. There were five or so options, and we chose the lunar sample container as a part of the Artemis missions.”

So, Andrews and his team built a capsule, complete with a Russian Doll nesting-style design, to finish the task. The team went through two rounds of presentations, a physical model and an essay to advance to their current position of NASA HUNCH finalists. Now, they’ve been allowed to present their project in late April in Houston, Texas, at NASA’s space center. 

Andrews and his team were students in the Engineering Design and Development class at the CAA last semester, and Chambers introduced the NASA HUNCH opportunity as an option to fulfill their capstone projects.

“We start class with a class meeting, kind of like you would start a week at a business meeting,” Chambers said. “They're, for the most part, off on their own. I make them turn in little checkpoints just to make sure that they're following along with their time management, but it's very student-centered.”

Although Andrews could’ve chosen to research a local engineering program, the opportunity to solve a problem for NASA was irresistible. It was real. And, an added bonus, the trio already had an idea of where to start. 

“The way NASA was thinking about it was very baseline, and they hadn't really experimented with new ideas or anything that we thought,” Andrews said. “We had original ideas that jumped out to us that NASA previously hadn't considered.”

Each member brought a unique trait to the team, according to Andrews. Phimmachanh welded the container together with his father, Andrews wrote a 92-page paper detailing the project and Son completed nearly 10 tests, including one evaluating the object’s seal with underwater examinations. 

But when the team lowered the container underwater, a common way to assess the airtight qualities of an object, bubbles emerged. Their project wasn’t airtight — a major requirement to fulfill, according to Son. 

“We were like, ‘Oh, shoot,’” Andrews said. “So that was kind of unfortunate to see, but we just decided we had to move on because it was gonna be too much work to reorder new pipes and recut and everything.”

Despite difficulties achieving a foolproof seal, the team was ready to present to the Design & Prototype Project Manager of NASA HUNCH, Glenn Johnson, for a critical design review in early November. Over Zoom, Johnson provided feedback to the group, suggesting additional testing on their design. 

“It was difficult, it was hard to hear that,” Andrews said. “Even though you'd been working with one thing for three months, maybe you missed something that could cost you.”

Andrews had class time to work on the project during the Engineering Design and Development class. According to Chambers, it’s based on a structure that students would encounter at a real engineering job, with a class meeting at the beginning and independent and small group work time. 

“I like to say in that class, I'm less of a teacher and more of a project manager,” Chambers said. “They take ownership of their projects, and I give them the outline of, ‘Hey, these are what expectations you would have in the industry if you were working on a problem like this.’”

The NASA HUNCH project works towards Andrews with hopes of becoming an Architectural Engineer. For Son, it’s Aerospace Engineering, and for Phimmachanh, it’s Mechanical Engineering.

In February, Andrews and his team presented their capsule on Zoom to Johnson in the final presentation. By March, via an announcement on Instagram, they were finalists.

“I was glad for the opportunity,” Andrews said. “I was excited to see that it all came to a close very well and that the [judge] didn’t have many comments; it was good to see that.”