Anna Alfred credits the robotics club, part of the HPGE (High Performance and Gifted Education) program at Blacktown Girls High School, for inspiring her to pursue a career in aeronautical engineering.

And the Year 12 student is on the launching pad to realise her ambition, after being one of only five students nationwide to be selected to receive a full Astronaut Al Worden Endeavour Scholarship.

The scholarship is an international program that sends aspiring young space explorers (aged 15-18) and their STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) teachers on an all-expenses-paid, week-long trip to NASA’s U.S. Space & Rocket Center’s Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama in late July to experience hands-on astronaut training

The scholarship winners participate in immersive, real-world STEM education, team-building exercises, and simulated space missions. The program is designed to inspire the next generation of innovators and foster international cooperation within the global aerospace community.

Anna is the first ever public-school student to be granted a scholarship, and she believes this achievement will inspire public-school students – particularly girls – to follow in her footsteps.

Her Science Teacher, Paul Chamberlain, encouraged Anna to apply for the “super competitive” scholarship believing that students in the robotics club, like Anna, are “more ambitious”.

The video Anna produced as part of her application focused on the inspiration granting her the scholarship would provide to other girls who come from public schools in socio-economically disadvantaged areas like Western Sydney.

Anna said, although she joined the robotics club in Year 8 at Blacktown Girls High for “fun”, it soon fuelled her “love of STEM”.

“We got into a lot of competitions; the adrenaline you get, the people you meet. All of that just combined,” she said. “Then in robotics we got to the Nationals and that’s when I thought that STEM is really my thing.”

The natural progression was to seek out a career in a STEM related field. Engineering to Anna was an obvious career pathway.

“You hear about the mainstream disciplines like civil engineering, electrical, chemical, but I thought, I want to do something more niche,” she said.

“Then I saw ‘aeronautical’; planes are cool; that’s engineering; it’s STEM. It’s a more like a new field. You can go to planes and then there’s like rockets so if I can get to do something in that it would be really nice.”

Anna believes the “robotics background definitely helped” her secure the NASA scholarship.

“I was able to show that this isn’t something I just decided – oh this is NASA - so I should apply but I was able to show that this is something that I have been passionate about for a couple of years and that I want to pursue in the future.,” she said.

Her application for the scholarship also discussed the potential for her to become a role model for girls, Western Sydney and public schools.

“In my application I talked about I come from a school that is in a low socio-economic area,” she said. “I’m also a girl; it’s harder for girls to enter [the space industry].

“I talked about the opportunities I would bring to students in Western Sydney specifically and public schools highlighting the fact that, even if we go to a public school in Western Sydney, even with all the disadvantages, we can still be ambitious and achieve our dreams.”

Teacher Paul Chamberlain said the robotics club at Blacktown High had laid the groundwork for Anna and other students to consider a future working in the space industry

“In robotics club, they have challenges which seem completely insurmountable,” he said. “They’re in teams of 10 and they have to work it out for themselves and when you go to any space camp, it’s the same. You have all these challenges that really take you outside of your comfort zone.

“It’s the same sort of engineering, trial and error design process. You have to figure out everything that could go wrong and try and account for that; just like people do when they go to space. Only for them it’s life and death, right?”

Blacktown Girls High Young Space Adventurers

Two other Blacktown Girls High students - Jenny Lee and Shalika Ravi – were among 32 young “space adventurers” from across NSW to experience a local space camp.

The Year 8 students were selected by Western Sydney University (WSU) to compete in the Space Teams Academy held in May.

The Year 8 students were part of the eight teams to represent WSU and complete a virtual space mission as part of an WSU mission team to design spacecraft, learn basics of interplanetary navigation, land their vehicles on an exoplanet, build a sustainable habitat in a hostile environment, and explore the strange exoplanet as a team to locate resources critical to sustaining human life for the duration of their mission.

Shalika and Jenny’s pitch, that won them a place at the academy, focused on designing sustainable space craft; specifically designing, engineering and developing technology that can reduce dangerous space debris and help protect satellites and the astronauts who rely on them. Even the International Space Station is having risks of the spacecraft colliding with space junk highlighting the urgency of the issue.

“The path through space is filled with dangerous debris moving faster than a bullet and as space exploration grows so does the need for systems that minimise waste, conserve energy and protect the environments we explore,” Shalika said. “

I want to build a spacecraft that can get rid of space junk so that astronauts that go to space can be safer.”