Deadline: November 3, 2025
Are you ready for this year’s NASA TechRise Student Challenge? This competition provides a hands-on opportunity for participants to gain critical skills in engineering, computing, electronics, and more that will be required for America’s technical workforce.
If you are in sixth to 12th-grade at a U.S. public, private, or charter school – including those in U.S. territories – your challenge is to team up with your schoolmates and develop a science or technology experiment idea for one of the following NASA TechRise flight vehicles:
- Suborbital-Spaceship with approximately 3 minutes of microgravity.
- High-Altitude Balloon with approximately 4 to 8 hours of flight time at 70,000 to 95,000 feet and exposure to Earth’s atmosphere, high-altitude radiation, and perspective views of our planet.
Prizes
A total of 60 winning teams will be selected to build their proposed experiment. Each winning team will be awarded:
- $1,500 to build their experiment
- A starter kit, including a flight box in which to build their experiment
- An assigned spot to test their experiment on a NASA-sponsored flight
- Technical support during the experiment build phase from Future Engineers advisors, who will help students learn the skills they need to turn their experiment idea into reality
Eligibility
- Open to SCHOOLS in U.S. states and territories.
- U.S. public, private, or charter schools that serve sixth to 12th-grade students can assemble a team (or multiple teams) and enter.
- The minimum number of students per team is four, and there is no maximum per team.
- Proposals must be submitted by a team lead that is a teacher or employee of the school.
- Homeschools are not eligible to participate unless they are affiliated with a public, private, or charter school that complies with the insurance requirements as stated in the rules.
Judging Criteria
- Impact of experiment on team’s education: 40 points
- Connection of experiment to NASA’s mission: 20 points
- Alignment of experiment to team’s hypothesis: 20 points
- Design of the experiment meets design guidelines: 20 points
Application
For more information, visit NASA TechRise Student Challenge.
