A Long Term ISU-UNISA Partnership: The SHSSP

Since 2011, the Southern Hemisphere Space Studies Program (SHSSP) has been held six times in Adelaide, Australia. The last program, which ran from January 9 to February 10, 2017, saw the engagement of 39 participants from around the world and over 45 international experts, whose backgrounds encompassed the entire spectrum of disciplines relevant to space exploration, industry and technology. The participants had a broad range of experiences, being represented by undergraduate students all the way to professionals employed in national space agencies, and entrepreneurs. This provided an exciting mix of motivations and abilities, which clearly epitomised the purpose of the program: to expose highly achieving students in training as well as accomplished professionals to a proxy of the multidisciplinary and multifaceted environment typical of space enterprises. The international, intercultural, and interdisciplinary philosophy of the program was reflected in a diversity of lectures, hands-on workshops, public events and team exercises, delivered by experts from Australia, America, Asia and Europe. A capstone project on the small satellite revolution involving participants, faculty and consulting experts, was synthesised in a paper entitled ‘Small Sats Big Shift: Recommendations for the Global South”. The 2017 program was highly successful, and the five week live-in program, complemented by one optional week of intensive English as second language program carried out before the commencement of the SHSSP, is now an established educational offering of the International Space University - University of South Australia (UniSA) consortium, which is presently exploring longer term agreements to continue and expand this productive educational collaboration beyond the next program, to be held at UniSA in January-February 2018