Five-year results of the world's first graduate-school-level space engineering fellowship program conducted between the UN and a university - called the PNST program

摘要

September 2017 will mark a major milestone in the "Post-graduate study on Nano-Satellite Technologies (PNST)" fellowship program conducted jointly by the United Nations and Kyushu Institute of Technology (Kyutech) in Japan. In September, the final batch of PNST fellows - four Phd-seeking students and two master-degree-seeking students - arrive at the Tobata Campus of Kyutech to begin their studies of nano-satellite technologies with a strong emphasis on "hands-on" training -- using state-of-the-art spacecraft test facilities. They become part of Kyutech's ongoing Space Engineering International Course (SEIC), which is the only English-based, graduate-level, space engineering program in Japan. There are over fifty international and Japanese students enrolled in SEIC. Since the start of the PNST program in 2013, twenty-seven international students have enrolled in it at Kyutech. To date, under PNST, seven students have obtained doctoral degrees and four students have obtained master degrees. In this paper, we explain how outstanding engineering fellows are selected from scores of non-space-faring nations -- a pool of tens of millions of young persons. We explain what we set out to do with this UN-academia collaboration in space engineering, and what we have achieved with it.