UANL High School Students selected for NASA Space Academy

The university students from Nuevo León were selected as part of the U.S. Space Academy training program, designed to foster scientific and technological careers among young people in Mexico.

Eight students from Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León (UANL) fulfilled their dream of visiting the U.S. Space and Rocket Center to learn the principles of rocketry and propulsion on a scale model, design prototypes of lunar landers, and participate in simulation missions to resolve technical emergencies in real time.

Through this initiative—the result of a collaboration between Nuevo León’s premier university, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico, and the Televisa Foundation—the UANL high school students stood out among 340 young people who applied for the Monterrey program between June and July 2025, thanks to their technical knowledge of space and their creativity in developing digital tools.

To achieve this goal, the students passed various evaluation stages and completed courses in mobile app development, Arduino programming, the fundamentals of artificial intelligence, the design of a patch to represent a space mission, and a video application featuring a scientific experiment and their reasons for joining the academy, reported Sandra del Río Muñoz, Director of the UANL Upper Secondary Education System.

In total, 32 high school students from across the country—from Monterrey, Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Querétaro—traveled to the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, the official training site for the Space Camp program affiliated with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

For Luisa Valentina Gutiérrez Jaimes, her interest in science and innovation was born through the Tecnolochicas program, so visiting “Rocket City” was an experience she will remember as one of the best of her life.

For Luis Alejandro Díaz Guerrero, his curiosity to learn about the universe and hear explanations of everything related to space missions was a dream come true on his path to pursuing a degree in mechatronics engineering.

The program also represents an opportunity to launch the students’ international careers through English language instruction and the promotion of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields. The goal is for them to inspire other young people in the future to consider careers in the aerospace industry, given the growth of this sector in Mexico.