Ireland Brown leads team to victory at the Space Station Design Workshop in Munich

“It kicked my butt, and I’m better for it.” says grad student Ireland Brown (Engineering Systems Lab) of her experience at the Space Station Design Workshop, hosted by the Technical University of Munich. The interdisciplinary engineering design and project management competition challenged participants from over 40 countries to develop a concept for a profitable commercial lunar infrastructure with a laboratory specific to propellant generation using lunar ISRU methods. 

The teams worked all day — and in some cases, all night — to complete the challenge in just one week. Brown’s team, Team Weiss, emerged victorious. 

Brown joined the workshop at the recommendation of her advisor, Prof. Olivier de Weck. The experience tied directly to research for her master’s thesis, which focuses on identifying correlations between logistics, architectural design, and operational costs in the context of commercial space profitability. “I was able to directly apply my research during the workshop as a part of my project management role. I was challenged in both my communication and time management skills,” says Brown.

“My biggest takeaway though, was working with who I consider to be the top space engineering team in my generation,” says Brown of the connections she made during the workshop. “Getting to collaborate with people from all over the world was a once in a lifetime experience. Not only were they all extremely capable and self-disciplined, but they were kind, funny, and made the stressful work week something I’d call fun. It was my pleasure to serve them as project manager, and if I ever was one in the future, I’d hire them all ten times over.”