NASA Student Launch 2026

Over 600 middle school, high school, and college students from across the nation launched 30 high-powered rockets just north of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. This year marked the 26th anniversary of the competition. To compete, students follow the NASA engineering design lifecycle by going through a series of reviews for nine months leading up to launch day. Each year, a payload challenge is issued to the university teams, and this year’s task took inspiration from the agency’s Artemis missions, where NASA will send astronauts to explore the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefit, and to build the foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars. Teams were challenged build and fly a STEMnaut Habitat for Agricultural Utilization Study (HAUS) that safely houses four STEMnauts, non-living objects representing astronauts. The habitat had to include equipment capable of both collecting and testing soil samples to support agricultural research operations.