“We hope to change that now, deciding to set our challenge beyond Earth’s Solar System to capture the attention and imagination of potential participants. This also avoids the chance of any teams having pre-existing technical knowledge to give them unfair advantage.”

The scenario of the Space Optimisation Competition, SpOC, open to research groups from anywhere in the world, is set thousands of years in the future, assuming a ‘Type II’ human civilization, capable of expanding into other star systems.

“The competition tells a story of settlement in three separate phases,” explains ACT research fellow Emmanuel Blazquez, working on mission analysis and guidance, navigation and control.