Next stop for three girls from the Big Island: NASA

HONOLULU (KHON2) — Anja Marie Henriques, Mikaella Casino, and Lynelle Yadao-Ellazar are aerospace design students from Makua Lani Christian Academy on the Big Island.

They designed and built a lunar habitat chair for the NASA HUNCH program, a competition where students design products that astronauts may use in space.

Their winning chair is specially designed for use on the moon.

With guidance from teacher Frederick Herrmann, the seniors spent all school year working on their prototype.

“It was a lot of trial and error. We originally thought the chair was going to be inflatable. Yeah, but that didn’t work. There were so many things that didn’t work. So honestly, something we learned is, if you want to make something work and build something that works, you have to experiment a lot,” said Henriques.

A lot of hours were put into this chair.

“So we have this thing called an FNS, which is a Friday nights which is basically when we all stay after school, Mr. Herman’s classroom and work on the things we don’t get to work on because, you know, a class is only so long, and so we stay after school. Usually until eight or nine at night,” said Yadao-Ellazar.

Losing all those Friday nights paid off.

The girls are heading to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, to meet with NASA and show off their lunar habitat chair. It’s a big leap from when they first signed up for aerospace classes.

“In the beginning, me and Lynelle originally just joined for fun, because we didn’t want to take a science class,” said Casino.

Turns out, aerospace classes taught them a lot about the cosmos.

“We’re so small, like I remember we’re talking like perspective of like, a person or even just like the whole earth compared to the universe,” said Henriques.

“Learning the importance of workspace collaboration, and getting to work with people, you know, from different backgrounds with different ideas,” said Yadao-Ellazar. “Because at the end of the day, like everybody has something to contribute to the table.”

“I learned that procrastination does not take you anywhere,” said Casino.

“If you want to do something, you got to do it right now. So like for us I think we struggled a lot with her fascinating a lot of things,” Casino further explained. “But with this chair kind of helped us learn more about you know, taking time and making ourselves be more wise with what we do and stuff like that.”

I’m really proud of them. What I like about them is their, their imaginations. I would put it this way, an engineer once told me that it’s better to work with young people, because when you work with young people, they don’t know yet what they can’t do. And so they assume they can do anything. And so you get this better ideal pool, I come up with these crazy ideas and these random ideas.”

Frederick Herrmann, Makua Lani Christian Academy teacher

“I feel like we always see boys kind of taking on that kind of stuff,” said Henriques. “And it can be discouraging, because that’s all you see. And it’s like, stereotypical, like, you can’t do that stuff. But we did. And we were very successful.”