It’s week 3, participants are heading into the final stretch with core lectures, and the Elective Workshops have begun. This week started with the midterm quiz(which everyone did great in!) then the class of ‘19 got to see if they have what it takes to become an astronaut in the Austronaut Challenge. Teams and individuals battled it out across a series of challenges designed to test their creative, physical, and mental skills. austronaut 043.MP4.18 49 48 23.Still001 

One particular highlight of this challenge was a station which took place in the lake on the ISU campus. Here, the team had to save our stranded Audio visual technician turned austronaut, Etienne Boucher from being lost in space using whatever they had in hand. In honour of his sacrifice, the lake has now officially been called Lough Etienne, and you can even find it on Google maps! Screen Shot 2019 07 17 at 17.43.49


The area surrounding Lough Etienne also became the official training grounds for ISU’s very own croquet club this week. The No Gateway Croquet Club (NGCC) meet whenever the full SSP schedule will allow, for golf croquet on the lawn, no previous experience is required to join!

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This week’s culture night was an all-singing-all-dancing extravaganza, with India really treating us to dinner and a show. Our Indian participants serenaded us and cooked us a mountain of amazing food; thankfully they also choreographed plenty of dancing for us to do too to help burn off everything we ate!

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Robots featured heavily in week 3, our resident robot expert Erin, treated us to a participant talk on the subject and we all decided we wanted to be her when we grow up. The robotics EWS also ran over 2 days this week, culminating in the ever popular robotics competition on Saturday! The workshop was undertaken by people who had no previous experience with robotics and the finished products were, as always, out of this world!