ENCINITAS — Nicolai Diaz has always been a dreamer.
Diaz, a 2023 graduate of San Dieguito Academy, said he was “always known as the space kid” and had an Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University pamphlet thumbtacked to the wall of his bedroom.
He now attends Embry-Riddle, studying aerospace engineering, will spend the upcoming summer working on a lunar lander project, and led the development of a device used during spacewalks on the International Space Station that will be tested by astronauts and engineers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston at the end of the month.
“Looking back, if I told my 8th-grade self that this was happening, his mind would be blown,” Diaz said. “It’s been such, such an incredible, incredible thing to be going through and such a privilege to challenge myself and to be challenged and to be able to meet all these amazing people.”
Diaz and six other Embry-Riddle students — “six of my good friends, well, now good friends,” he said — took part in NASA’s Micro-Gravity Neutral Buoyancy Experiment Design Team Challenge. The annual program asks college undergraduates to design, build and test a device that addresses a real-world problem with space exploration.
This year’s challenge involved finding a better way to attach the space drill to astronauts’ tool belts when outside the International Space Station.
“We came up with prototype after prototype after prototype,” Diaz said.
They called their team the “Micro-Nauts” and gathered at a coffee shop in January to see if their proposal would be selected for the next round of testing from among thousands of submissions.
The Micro-Nauts were one of 16 teams selected to advance and were joined by two other Embry-Riddle teams.
“The first thing that we thought, of course, after our celebration, was, ‘Wow, we’ve got a lot of work cut out for us,’” Diaz said. “But we knew that it was going to be absolutely amazing and absolutely worth every second, every late night.”
They launched a GoFundMe and assessed how much the university could contribute to test, develop, retest and tweak their design.
Diaz said he cannot wait to test their device in NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab later in the month.
“We’re going to be in the earpiece with the astronauts that are in the pool with the life-size replica of the international space station doing these procedures and pushing our device to its limits,” he said.
The project will not be the only space-related reason bringing Diaz to the Lone Star State this summer.
On Monday, May 11, he will begin an internship with Firefly Aerospace, working on the Blue Ghost.
Firefly Aerospace, based in Cedar Park, Texas, was the first private company to successfully land upright on the moon, according to a news release
“They’re about the size of a startup, but they’ve got the momentum of a company that’s been around for a long time,” Diaz said. “So they’ve been doing some really great things and it’s an incredible opportunity to have this internship. It wouldn’t be possible without the experience that I’ve been doing, like the NASA project.”
The project comes shortly after NASA completed Artemis II, a nearly 10-day mission around the moon that splashed down off the coast of San Diego on April 10. The expedition marks the agency’s latest push to return astronauts to the lunar surface and eventually send humans to Mars.
Diaz credits much of his success to an emphasis on the why rather than focusing on the what.
“A lot of the people I know at Embry-Riddle, a lot of my good friends, spent their extracurriculars doing robotics and doing all these extra projects,” Diaz said. “I think what’s really funny is, I tell them, ‘Hey, I did sports. I did theater in my early days of high school. I did these things that aren’t really STEM-focused.
“When it comes to extracurriculars in high school, specifically, it’s more about the passion underlying. I know I want to go here, and I know I can still do the other things that I enjoy, and I know I can still push myself. And hey, even if I’m not matching up with all these people that have this background, it doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t try.”
Watch the Micro-Nauts video proposal:
Watch the NASA Selection Announcement:
