On 1 September 2016 ISU’s Space Studies Program, SSP16, was successfully closed at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa. SSP16 director John Connolly received the traditional SSP poster signed by all the participants at this occasion.

The audience was addressed by video by Bob Richards, ISU founder, Prof. Pini Gurfil on behalf of the Local Organizing Committee and Tom Cremins, representing NASA. Nahum Zamora presented the views of the participants as class speaker, who got their SSP certificates in the presence of Steve Brody, ISU Vice President.

Also as per ISU tradition, Prof. Niall Smith, representing the SSP17 Local Organizing Committee, presented the Cork Institute of Technology, the next SSP site. He was introduced by Dr. Omar Hatamleh, who will take over as SSP director, on detachment from NASA.

The day before, the three SSP16 Team Projects were presented, namely:

• STARPORT1, presenting the concept of a commercial space station in LEO. The station foresees artificial gravity for a permanent habitation of 200 people;
• aMARTE reviewed the most recent discoveries on the Martian environment and evaluated the different implications thereof for human Mars exploration;
• SPACE BIG DATA examined the exponential growth of data received from space assets and proposed a solution, involving the private sector, to exploit these data.

More details on the outcome of this project can be found in the video:

With this first SSP ever in Israel being a success, and the next SSPs also taking place in countries which never hosted an SSP before, ISU is more and more continuing to expand its footprint all over the world.