PHAT earned first place overall after three Cal Poly mechanical engineering senior project teams advanced to the 12-team finalist field
Spaceflight is easy to picture at liftoff, all fire and force. Harder to picture is the life that follows, when astronauts are trying to sleep in a noisy cabin and depend on equipment that must keep working far from any easy fix.
Those less visible realities sit at the center of NASA’s 2026 Human Lander Challenge, which asked college teams to rethink pieces of the life support astronauts will need as NASA pushes toward longer stays on the moon and, eventually, travel to Mars.
This spring, three Cal Poly senior project teams were named finalists in the challenge, the largest showing in a 12-team field that also included two teams each from Purdue and Embry-Riddle. To the students, the result felt like validation of the way Cal Poly prepares engineers to meet complex challenges with confidence.
In Huntsville, Alabama, one of those Cal Poly teams went even further. PHAT, short for Peltier-based Hydration Accumulation Terminal, won first place overall with a system designed to give astronauts access to cold drinking water during future lunar and Mars missions. Cal Poly finished ahead of Purdue University, which placed second, and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach, which placed third.
Their proposals reflected that approach, translating NASA’s life-support challenge into the daily realities astronauts could face, from cabin noise inside a human lander to fluid transfer on the lunar surface and cold drinking water during extended missions.
Three Answers to the Same Challenge
Behind that finalist showing were three teams translating the realities of long-duration spaceflight into designs astronauts could one day rely on. Mechanical engineering seniors Julia Megargle, Griffin Vernon and Tarsem Pal each offered a window into a different part of the effort.
Megargle offered insight into MASS, short for Modular Acoustic Suppression System, a proposal that started with a sound astronauts might not be able to escape. Inside a human lander, the constant hum of life support hardware can wear on sleep, concentration and communication over time. The team’s answer was an adjustable sound-suppression system designed to respond to low-frequency noise and make the cabin more livable.
Where MASS stayed inside the lander, CQC shifted the focus outside it. The team Vernon described took on the problem of moving fluids safely between habitats and vehicles on the moon and Mars, including the water, oxygen, fuel and waste streams a future surface base would need. In that environment, a connection must withstand extreme temperatures and abrasive lunar dust without leaking or damaging its seals. Cryogenic Quick Connection centered on a self-aligning coupling designed to twist into place quickly and stay locked. Vernon compared it to “a complicated garden hose attachment.”
Pal’s team came at the challenge from a more familiar human need. PHAT asked what it would take to give astronauts cold drinking water during long stays in space. “It’s a hydration station,” Pal said. On a human lander, he explained, astronauts would have hot and ambient water, but not cold. After speaking with an astronaut, the team began exploring a system that could provide cold water while also addressing cleaning and microbial growth.
Each student found a different way into the work. Megargle was drawn to a problem she had never tackled before. Vernon liked the idea of inventing for space, even in an area that had long challenged him. Pal wanted, in his words, “something crazy” for his senior project.
By the end, the challenge had sharpened Pal’s sense of the engineering hidden inside daily life off Earth. “It goes to show how much work it takes to put anything in space, just to attach a hose, suppress noise and get a cup of cold water,” he said.
Before PHAT’s first-place finish, the finalist announcement had already connected the teams’ senior projects to a larger Cal Poly space moment.
From Cal Poly to Artemis
As the teams refined their proposals, another Cal Poly space story was unfolding in public. Engineering graduate Victor Glover was piloting NASA’s Artemis II mission around the moon, and the HuLC finalist news arrived during that same window.
The timing made the moment feel bigger than a senior project milestone. Megargle called it “a full circle moment,” connecting the news to the reason she found her way into engineering in the first place. “I had fallen in love with engineering and space specifically during my senior year in high school,” she said. “Now, as a college senior, I’m watching someone from Cal Poly pilot the rocket while we were being named finalists. Look how far I’ve come!”
Vernon remembered the excitement reaching beyond the project teams. “It was amazing,” he said. “All my friends were following the mission. We celebrated the launch and I may have skipped class to watch it,” he added with a laugh. “It was a proud moment for me personally and for Cal Poly.”
That overlap raised the stakes in front of them. Vernon had wondered whether Cal Poly’s applied approach would translate in a competition that seemed more theoretical. Pal saw a different kind of balancing act. “We had to design our projects like a space company would but had to scale it down to a Cal Poly budget,” he said.
The finalist round added another layer, requiring each team to respond to judge feedback and strengthen its design before traveling to Alabama.
A Final Test in Alabama
In Huntsville, teams delivered 25-minute presentations, answered questions from NASA and industry judges, and shared their work during a poster session, with technical papers accounting for 70% of the final score.
For PHAT, the winning formula was a mix of practical design and engaging delivery. Rather than proposing a new dispenser from scratch, the team designed a modular add-on that could work with existing spacecraft water systems. The PHAT acronym also gave judges a memorable point of connection in a highly technical competition.
“I really think they liked that our design was simple enough, had little risk, was safe and would be easy to integrate,” Pal said.
The moment carried extra weight for him. After four years at Santa Rosa Junior College and an earlier rejection from Cal Poly, Pal transferred in looking for a senior project that would stretch him.
Now, that project has earned NASA’s top HuLC honor.
The win also gave students a clearer view of how Cal Poly’s Learn by Doing approach translated beyond campus. Pace said the team’s prototype work and testing helped them speak with confidence in front of NASA and industry judges.
“Learn by Doing is real,” Pace said. “You see it when you compare Cal Poly to other teams.”
Pal said one judge told the team the concept could have a future beyond the competition. The team’s technical paper will also be added to NASA’s repository, giving PHAT a place in the broader record of ideas being explored for future life-support systems.
By Emily Slater
