Seven South African high school learners were part of the winning company at the International Space Settlement Design Competition finals, held at Kennedy Space Centre and Walt Disney World Resort in Florida from 30 July to 2 August.

Team ZA was the only African team in the field, and it was South Africa's first entry. They were placed in Rockdonnell alongside teams from the United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil, China and two US regions, the first company in the competition's history to draw from every inhabited continent. Rockdonnell won on 2 August.

The competition is older and more independent than the coverage suggests. The first one ran in Columbus, Ohio in August 1984 with about 75 participants, as part of a Boy Scouts conference, and was built by Anita Gale, Dick Edwards and Rob Kolstad. It is run by Aerospace Education Competitions with the AIAA Houston Section and support from the National Space Society.

NASA backs it, and the finals rent NASA facilities, but NASA does not sponsor it. That matters for the prize Joseph Allderman won: the Anita Gale Creative Genius Prize is named for the co-founder who personally wrote the RFPs and future-history program books until her death in 2024, and only four were awarded.

This year's brief, set in 2086, asked for a crewed vessel carrying 3,000 residents between inner Solar System settlements. Rockdonnell's answer, Hermes, used a rotating structure for three levels of artificial gravity, nuclear thermal and ion propulsion, and a magnetic radiation shield.

MyBroadband reports 238 competitors from 17 countries and 113 volunteers, with four fictional companies of around sixty learners each given roughly 48 hours to answer the brief. Aerospace Education Competitions notes most of its volunteers are working or retired engineers, and many are former participants. Plainsman names the learners' schools: Westerford, Bishops Diocesan College, Cannons Creek and Fairmont.

Jagger Cooper-Doubell, who chairs the South Africa Space Design Competition, put it well: the talent was never missing, the opportunity was. The result backs him. But look at the funnel honestly. 109 learners from nine schools contested the national finals at UCT in March, and all seven who flew are from Western Cape schools.

That is not a knock on a first-year programme run largely on volunteer effort, and Zayaan Abdurahman from Mitchells Plain, who had never been on a plane before, shows the net went wider than the school names imply. The point is what year two costs. A national final at a university and seven plane tickets produced people who can read a client brief, interrogate its requirements and defend a design under examination by working aerospace engineers.

Every company in this country that says it cannot find skilled people should price that against what it currently spends on graduate recruitment.

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