Tirupati lad Aditya’s Plethora project draws NASA attention

Tirupati: Tirupati lad P Sumiran Aditya, studying class X who has ‘his eye in the sky’ and has many ideas about space travel got a chance to visit NASA in USA to give a presentation on space settlement. A student of Sri Chaitnya Techno School at GS Mada Street in Tirupati, he participated in the worldwide “NASA Ames Space Settlement Contest” held in June this year.

On receiving the information about the contest and motivation from the school principal Rajasekhar Reddy, Aditya prepared a presentation on his ideas. His parents Pasupuleti Sivaprasad and Kiranmai also encouraged him to proceed with his plans. NASA is organising this contest every year.

The idea behind this was that, a billion years ago there was no life on land. Today earth teems with life. Similarly, on the International Space Station, there are only a handful of astronauts, a few plants, animals and some bacteria & fungi.

To change this, Gerard O’Neil discovered that by building gigantic spaceships human kind can live in them. NASA is encouraging the future generations to come up with their ideas on building such spaceships.

Aditya was preparing plans to become a part of the space research by 2040. He focused his presentation on space settlement designing. He has named his space shuttle as ‘The Plethora’. When earth is affected by any catastrophe and gets shattered and human life becomes really impossible, Plethora will be the only option to find a constant settlement in space, said Aditya.

Explaining his project to The Hans India, he said there is a high possibility that the mankind will not survive on the earth after a few millennia just like dinosaurs. Entire humankind will be extinct which will be the end of human existence.

From this point the concept of space settlement was developed. “If we are able to find an innovative idea of making a space settlement which will be safe for us and also for protecting Mother Earth”, he said.

He said that the population of earth is 7.125 billion. Soon, it will triple but not the resources. Space settlement might be a lookout for extending the world. The aim is to be able to create another place for humans to live like on earth.

They wanted to place the settlement between Earth and Moon. The reasons are: Time for travel is not as prolonged; the conditions and psychology will not be that drastically affected; all resources required from Earth can be easily dispatched and there wouldn’t be an abundant supply of direct sunlight.

Aditya’s Plethora was aimed at providing residences for 70000 and all the basic amenities were planned in it. They include, survival in Plethora, human life designing, life support systems, law and order, schooling, occupation, hospitals, recreation, transportation and everything else.

The contest was held for students from sixth class to Intermediate with the aim of establishing residential homes in Space. Aditya was one among the two selected for the presentation in NASA from Andhra Pradesh.

During the five-day conference held at San Francisco, several aspects relating to the Space settlement were deliberated at length. The President of Space settlement contest for this year Dr Al Globus went through his proposal and selected it for the conference.

Aditya is very much determined to work with NASA in future. For this, his target is to do a degree in Aero Space in Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and become a space scientist. He said “by participating in the conference I have learnt many things about space. Visiting theme parks gave me an amazing experience”.

By V Pradeep Kumar