Tulane doesn’t have an aerospace engineering program (yet), but six students refused to let a little thing like that keep them from winning NASA’s Breakthrough, Innovative and Game-changing (BIG) Idea challenge.

What they lacked in space design experience, they made up for with interdisciplinary collaboration, a whole lot of creativity, and access to the Tulane MakerSpace, where you’ll find engineers, artists, architects and other innovators (known collectively as MakerNinjas) working hard to bring their own concepts into physical reality.

“We decided that if we were going to compete against some aerospace engineers, we can’t beat them. We can’t find a better design than some people that have been studying this for their whole lives,” junior Ethan Gasta said. “So, we decided to go a whole completely new route.”

The result was “The Sunflower.” Built to be assembled in space, this modular, solar-powered spacecraft beat out 28 other schools and won the team five paid internships to continue working with NASA to bring the concept to life.

In this new age of technology, it’s easier for people of all backgrounds to create than ever before. “If you can get an engineer and an artist working together at the same bench and looking at each other’s designs, then the two are going to talk to each other, both of their designs are going to be improved as a result,” says Dr. Cedric Walker, project director of MakerSpace and professor emeritus for the Department of Biomedical Engineering, on the space’s collaborative nature. This opens the doors for ideas to come up from anywhere, ideas that lead to reimagined prosthetic hands and NASA-approved spacecraft designs. If you can imagine it, we can build it.

No one expected a team studying biomedical engineering, physics, economics and architecture to take first place, and that’s exactly why this is such a victory, not just for Tulane but for future generations. The most crucial breakthroughs are the ones we tackle because they are challenging, and it’s on all of us to support those courageous enough to take the lead.