The universe is a vacuum of unexplored treasures and students at the college level are now given the opportunity to become involved in real NASA programs and missions.

Although students in college may think of working with NASA as a farfetched dream, it is no longer unreachable. Six finalist teams selected from many competing universities will be chosen from the NASA Means Business Student Competition 2001 to create an architectural framework that will be incorporated into NASA's 'Customer Engagement' course of action when dealing with space missions.

"We will have the ability to make more informed decisions about NASA as an organization. We will get to know more of what to expect from this hands-on experience if later in life students want to apply for an actual job at NASA," said Shubha Janardhan (freshman-business).

Each of the six finalist student teams may include any number of graduate and undergraduate students and must include a supervising faculty member.

The team may consist of various majors such as business, marketing, communications, engineering, advertising and other programs. NASA encourages this interdisciplinary formation because it provides a variety of skills in different areas.

"Engineers don't understand enough about marketing or communications skills that are essential in knowing what a customer wants; therefore the team should be composed of a mixed variety of majors," said Humboldt Mandell Jr., manager of customer engagement at NASA.

"The better proposals brings all the skills and disciplines into use," he added.

Teams that are selected will be awarded with $1,000 and travel grants to Johnson Space Center to show their work at the Third Annual Customer Engagement Conference from May 22 to 24, 2001.

A proposal will be due Jan. 19, 2001 that must contain a cover page, a brief 300-word summary of the proposal, essay of the proposed NASA Mars Customer Engagement Architecture, outreach plan and other supplemental information. More details about the competition may be found at www.tsgc.utexas.edu/nmb/.

At this moment, NASA does not know what the customers want. The whole initiative of this competition is to allow students to develop methods to educate the customers on what the mission is about and how much it would cost.

Finalists must try and earn public support and determine what the customers and stakeholders need and desire.

"There is a common misconception by the public of how NASA spends their money," Mandell said. "The customers should be able to know where their money is going since they are the ones paying the bills."

Architecture is the framework and processes within which a mission is designed, according to www.tsgc.utexas. edu/nmb/.

An architectural framework is used at NASA to develop customer engagement. NASA finds out what values and ideals the public finds most important about a mission, for example, excitement or expense with regards to the Mars expedition.

"The architectural framework basically starts out by using surveys to find out what is important to people. Since most of NASA's customers are the taxpayers, NASA tries to develop a structure that will provide better values for the customers," Mandell said.

Knowing what the customers want is a crucial part of this program.

"If we know that the customers want excitement to be brought home during the Mars mission," Mandell said, "then we can use IMAX movie cameras to broadcast from the spaceships."

Mandell said the next major program to Mars would be sending humans to the red planet. Robotic programs are already sent by spacecraft to Mars looking for ways to bring human involvement onto its surface.

By 2007, NASA hopes that Congress and the administrators will approve of the mission and by 2011 a sort of village habitat would already have been built on the planet's surface and six people would be living in it.

The village would consist of a dormitory, laboratory, clinic, method of maintenance to repair broken things, utility systems such as water and electricity and other buildings that a typical habitat would contain.

"Last year we developed a customer engagement plan but the problem was we do not have a strong knowledge of the customers opinions in sending people to Mars," Mandell said.

"This year is a follow up with specific tasks to develop an approach or a process like a cookbook that would make customer engagement better."

Last year's six finalist teams were from Georgia Tech, University of Texas-Austin, University of Colorado-Boulder, MIT, Stanford University and University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign.

"I think Penn State stands a good chance at being one of the finalists in the competition because we have outstanding students," said Angela Phelps, program assistant and Web designer of the Pennsylvania Space Grant Consortium.

"This NASA plan is very exciting. Eventually, we will go to Mars and it is nice to introduce a plan where it brings many different students from a variety of majors to work together on this," Phelps added.

The best ideas from NASA competition will be taken and put together into an actual business plan by NASA.

"This opportunity will help benefit the students because sooner or later everyone would have to organize a proposal to assist their own customers," Mandell said. "This is a practical experience in an interdisciplinary sense where all walks of life have a chance to work together."