Bulgarian high school students have won NASA's Grand Prize in the 2014 Space Settlement Contest.

Nedelcho Laskov, Ivan Popov, Atanas Kovachev and their teachers from Varna have created an innovative project called Green Space, inspired by the ideas of Greenpeace.

NASA Ames Space Settlement Design Contest is an annual competition for students worldwide. The project of the Bulgarian team ranked first among more than 600 submitted this year.

The main problems that Green Space addresses concern the cleaning of the Earth's environment from space debris, neutralizing dangerous asteroids close to our planet, as well as developing a number of scientific fields for which the cosmos provides appropriate conditions and new opportunities.

Students and their teachers are proud of the fact that they have performed a careful study of all the analyzed issues and all proposed solutions are fully science-backed. The team has previously reached second place in 2012 in NASA's Space Settlement Design Contest.

Green Space is not the only Bulgarian project to receive a NASA award. The space station Daphne project was awarded the first prize of the jury for 12 grade students and Aqua de Vita, a space colony that obtains water from comets, got the encouragement prize.