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High school students United with NASA to Create Hardware or HUNCH is an innovative school-based program that partners NASA Centers with schools (elementary, middle, high school, and post-secondary) nationwide. The partnership involves students fabricating real-world products for NASA and astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) as they apply their science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) skills while learning to work in teams and think creatively.

Photo Credit: NASA Langley Research Center/ Mark Knopp

HUNCH reaches students across the nation with diverse interests and brings them into the ISS program, creating various products to improve the lives of the Space Station crew. Receiving input directly from astronauts to enhance crew life on the ISS provides multiple avenues within and beyond the STEM field while including students as part of the global effort to research space. NASA HUNCH brings students new educational experiences with NASA projects in the following areas:

Design & Prototyping

Students work on designing prototypes of items the astronauts would like to see fabricated for use aboard ISS.

Culinary

Students design an entrée for the astronauts to eat aboard the ISS.

Software

Students work with NASA to build software applications for the ISS.

Hardware

Students fabricate high-quality hardware for training and for flight to the ISS.

Sewn Flight Articles

Students use fabric and other soft materials to create goods requested by different NASA Centers and the ISS Astronaut Crew.

Video & Media

Students utilize their interest and knowledge of media production to produce educational videos about NASA’s mission and experiments aboard the ISS.  *This project is available to elementary, middle, high school and post-secondary students!

Biomedical Science

Students examine the physiological changes that happen to humans in space and find ways to mitigate those changes as we look to the future of colonization on the Moon and Mars.

Flight Configuration

Students continue working on their project from the previous year or may work on a new project chosen to move on to flight completion.

How to participate?