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A research team led by Carthage College professor Kevin Crosby has won a NASA TechLeap Prize worth up to $500,000, funding valuable development of potentially important technology for future space exploration.

Their project was one of 10 selected from a pool of more than 200 entries in NASA’s Space Technology Payload Challenge. The award recognizes a promising new line of space science research that Prof. Crosby and several Carthage students are conducting.

Kevin CrosbyWinning teams are chosen based on their potential to fill technological gaps that NASA has identified. The Carthage team’s work involves Microgravity Ullage Trapping (MUT), an innovative method designed to make in-space refueling more efficient and help pave the way for sustained missions to the Moon and Mars.

This prize funding will enable the researchers to build an experimental payload with the opportunity to test it on a suborbital, hosted orbital, or parabolic flight. Prof. Crosby’s team needs to deliver the hardware for testing by April 1, 2026.

Five students from the Carthage Microgravity Team were selected to work on the project beginning this fall: Juliana Alvarez ’27, Owen Bonnett ’28, Semaje Farmer ’26, Skylar Farr ’26, and Braedon Larsen ’27.

“We’re grateful to NASA for selecting our team, and for the opportunity that this TechLeap Prize provides,” says Prof. Crosby, who also directs the Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium with Carthage as the state’s lead institution. “The timeline to achieve flight readiness is keeping us sharply focused, and we’re learning a tremendous amount — not just about space-qualified system design and electronics, but also about modeling, project management, and experimental design.”

The team will build a payload based on a solution that Prof. Crosby and longtime collaborator Álvaro Romero-Calvo of the Georgia Institute of Technology devised to win last year’s NASA Tank Venting Challenge. It uses carefully controlled acoustic fields to manipulate and concentrate pressurant gas bubbles, enabling efficient venting without significant propellant loss.

The same group of Carthage students recently completed summer internships at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. The team also includes both faculty leaders, three graduate students from Georgia Tech’s aerospace engineering program — including recent Carthage graduate Justin Wheeler ’25 — and NASA engineer Brian Nufer from Kennedy Space Center.

This is one of several ongoing lines of research in Carthage’s well-established space sciences program. For nearly two decades, faculty and students have partnered with the space agency and leading companies to solve problems in the aerospace industry.

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