Junior Leia Spaniak has made the Regina community proud with the successful launch of her team’s science experiment through the Higher Orbits’ Go For Launch program. Go For Launch is an initiative for eighth to twelfth graders created by Higher Orbits, a non-profit based out of Virginia.

Their mission statement found on their website calls for “promoting Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM); along with leadership, teamwork, and communication through the use of spaceflight.” 

The non-profit was founded by Michelle Lucas, a former NASA employee who worked primarily in International Space Station Flight Control Operations Planning as well as an Astronaut Instructor in the Daily Operations Group. 

Students in this program are exposed to speakers like astronauts, former International Space Station and Space Shuttle Flight Controllers, scientists, and engineers. After hearing the speeches, students are divided into teams where they collaborate on a project that they have defined and designed. At the conclusion of this four-day long event, the team presents their ideas to a panel of Space and STEM field judges who will then choose the winner who will eventually have their experiment launched to the International Space Station.

After a team wins their local event, they will either be placed in competition with projects in the same series to decide which project will launch or will launch without having to win the series event, based on the amount of available funds.

Leia was first introduced to the Go For Launch program as an eighth-grader at St. Norbert Catholic School in Northbrook. The first project Leia worked on, when she was a rising freshman, focused on a project regarding tardigrades , which are most commonly known as water bears, in which she studied their reproductive traits.

After that project, Leia worked on a project studying hydra regeneration in astaxanthin and algae. Leia and her team, called Team Reginae Reginarum, consisting of members Hailey Brown, Aiyana Dutcher, Lizzy Fournier, and Trinity Nett won the local event for that project. The team was the 2018 series winners, which focused on determining if microgravity affects the production of Astaxanthin in H. Pluvialis. This experiment will be successful in seeing the effects of algae as a main component in anti-inflammatory medication for arthritis. 

The launch day was an exciting day for Leia and her teammates as they woke up early and took a bus to the viewing location at the Wallops Flight Facility. Leia and her team’s project was then launched into space where it will be housed at the International Space Station.

The experiment will remain there for a month. The team will be able to get real-time updates sent directly from the space station. After the project returns to earth, the next steps are for the team to compile the data and analyze it. This is an exciting accomplishment for Leia and her team and they, as well as the Regina community, will be excited to see the results of the experiment.

Looking forward, Leia plans to continue onward with the Go For Launch program next year. For now, Leia is enjoying physics at Regina and plans on majoring in engineering or a science related field in the future.