Rules
Submissions must relate to orbital settlements. Settlements may not be on a planet or moon. Settlements must be permanent, relatively self-sufficient homes, not temporary work camps. Submissions may focus on one or a few aspects of space settlement and supporting systems, including mines, activities leading up to settlement (such as space hotels), economic and social issues, etc.
Designs, original research, essays, stories, models, artwork or any other orbital space settlement related materials may be submitted.
Submissions must be made in hard copy. No electronic submissions are accepted under any circumstances. This includes Power Point presentations, discs, CD's, DVD, videos or anything but paper. NASA does not return contestant submissions. However, you may create an electronic project, such as a video or web site, and send us a hard copy description of the project. The description should include images and text to describe the project in sufficient detail for judgement. If your electronic project is web accessible, you may include the URL. It will not be used for judging, but NASA may, at its discretion, link to your project from the contest results
page. Two copies of the entry form with the appropriate information must be included with the submission; one firmly attached to the submission and one loosely attached (for example, with a paper clip). Be sure to fill out all fields. Please type if at all possible. Use a separate sheet if necessary.
The submission must be the student's own work. Plagiarism is forbidden. No part of an entry may copied with one exception: You may quote short passages, but only if the material is surrounded in double quotes (") and the source indicated. For example: "This material copied from somewhere," My Favorite Space Book. Quoted materials should rarely be more than a few lines, and never longer than a few paragraphs. Quoting long passages is forbidden. Entries caught plagiarizing, even one part of a large entry, will be disqualified and disposed of. Instructors, mentors or parents may assist the student by presenting relevant resources, discussing core concepts and minor editing, but the work itself must be entirely student driven.
Always include a bibliography. Submissions are not returned. Keep a copy for yourself.
Plagiarism
You may use other people's ideas in your entry, but not other people's writing. You may use images from the web, but please credit the source. In recent years plagiarism, copying other people's writing rather than doing your own, has become a serious problem. Every year up to 30% of all entries are caught copying materials from the web. They are eliminated from the competition. To avoid plagiarism, we recommend that you:
- Never use copy/paste for any text in your project.
- Never write your project while looking at anybody else's text.
- Never memorize a passage and type it into your project.
In other words: always write it yourself. Note that copying material and changing a few words here and there is also plagiarism. Write your own material!
We expect teachers to check every project from their students for plagiarism and not permit entries with plagiarism to be sent to NASA. To check for plagiarism look for places where the English is very good and/or is a different style from the rest of the project. Use Google (or other search engine) by surrounding 6-8 suspect words with double quotes, for example "text I think might be plagiarised by someone." If there is a perfect match, then look at the source material to make sure there wasn't an accidental match. Most of the time it will be plagiarism and must be removed from the project. There are also some automated plagiarism detectors available
on the web. Consider using them. Please do not send us plagiarized material!
Plagiarism is particularly sad for teams when one team member plagiarizes and the others are ethical. For teams, we recommend that students check each other for plagiarism.
