U-M Students Win First Place in Blue Origin’s Blue Ring Competition

Two rising sophomores in the University of Michigan Aerospace Engineering program, Caspar Touloukian and Dominik Bodzianowski, recently won first place in the first ever Blue Origin Blue Ring Competition. The competition, developed and judged by aerospace manufacturer Blue Origin, invited students from seven pre-selected universities to share their ideas for a future mission using the company’s new orbital transfer vehicle, Blue Ring.

Unveiled in October 2023, Blue Ring focuses on providing in-space logistics and delivery for commercial and government customers. The spacecraft has the ability to provide services from Earth orbit to cislunar space and beyond. The competition required the students to write a six-page memo about a future mission on Blue Ring while showcasing its capabilities and explaining how to accomplish the ideas for the mission they developed.

Once the competition was announced, Touloukian and Bodzianowski quickly set their sights on a mission to Mars. “We always knew Mars was the end goal. We joined a Q&A where Blue Origin hinted at their interest in the red planet,” Touloukian stated.

With the help of their friends and peers at U-M, the students discussed ideas on how to develop a Mars mission for the Blue Ring. The problem these students initially wanted to solve was the future increase in data transfer from Mars to Earth and back. 

“Mars is so far away, and currently, there is really only one system in its orbit that can get information from Mars to Earth, and that is the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Odyssey, and a few others. All of which are more than 20 years old,” said Touloukian. Another problem the students considered solving was how to avoid the loss of communication when the sun is between Mars and Earth, which usually takes place for about two weeks every two years.

The team predicted that in the coming years, it will be difficult to keep up with the increase in data as Mars’s availability and popularity grow. Based on this prediction, they crafted the idea of putting a set of satellites around Mars using the Blue Ring to help transmit data from Mars to Earth more efficiently. 

“Our idea is that no matter where you are on the surface of Mars, there will always be a satellite above you where you can transmit data to,” Bodzianowski stated. He then went on to further explain that by using the Blue Ring’s bus-like capability to ship all the satellites, while using its onboard computing services to manage them once in Martian orbit, this increase in data wouldn’t be a problem. ”We also planned on using novel laser-based communications systems to increase data transfer rates in between the planets. We got this idea from NASA’s mission PSYCHE,” added Touloukian.

This was the first time Blue Origin hosted its Blue Ring Competition. For winning first place, the students will get an opportunity to travel to Blue Origin’s Rocket Park facilities in Florida to network and meet with representatives from Blue Origin. 

“It was a really good exercise in technical writing. I feel like this was my first real example of what it might be like to communicate ideas through writing so that other people understand what you are saying and make them agree that your ideas is actually a good idea,” said Bodzianowski.

The Blue Ring competition invited students from the following universities to compete: California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Purdue University, Stanford University, University of Colorado Boulder, University of Michigan, and University of Washington.