A team of Surrey students have put Canada on the galactic map by becoming the first Canadian group to take the top spot at NASA’s International Space Settlement Design Competition.

The students, hailing from Princess Margaret Secondary, blasted off in late July for the competition after qualifying for the third year in a row. There, the team joined four other groups to create a makeshift company and went head-to-head against three other “companies” in designing the best moon settlement within a set amount of time.

Along with Ismit Singh, other members hailing from PM are Alice Ho, Zoubhair Moosuddee, Harinder Khak, Gurleen Brar, Mariyam Ali, Ramansh Chhabra, Aaaqil Hassan, Taran Gill and Hassan Sheikh.

The competition is only open to high school students, and this year marked the last year much of the team would be able to compete. However, due to having so many students on the team who had competed previously.

Helping the team in their design were two advisors provided by the competition sponsors, NASA and Boeing – a NASA engineer and futurist Dr. Jack Bacon.