Student Experiments Get Second Chance in Space

Young students who watched in devastation as their science projects exploded along with an unmanned Antares rocket bound for the International Space Station in October have gotten a second chance. Astronauts finally conducted their experiments in space over the past few weeks, and the results are slated to head back to Earth for students to study on Tuesday.

"I just can't believe [astronauts] are actually touching something we designed," Regina Alsabagh, an eighth-grader at Wilkinson Middle School in Michigan, told NBC News. "It shows our hard work is not lost, even though we were so sad before."

It's long-overdue payoff for Alsabagh's team and the other 17 student groups whose experiments were selected from among nearly 1,500 proposals to the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP) -- which arranges for astronauts to conduct experiments in space while students replicate them in the classroom.

The projects were originally meant to make it to space in a cargo ship attached to an Orbital Sciences Antares rocket that launched October 28. But student teams across the nation watched, horrified, as the unmanned craft exploded a few moments after it took off near the coast of Virginia.

But the next day, the teams found out SSEP had quickly arranged for the student groups to get a second chance. The catch: They had only two weeks to re-do their projects (at no cost to their districts). Those re-worked experiments finally made it to space on a SpaceX rocket that launched successfully on January 10.

Astronauts at the International Space Station finally began working on the students' projects in late January, and they're due back on Earth on Feb. 10.

It's been a long and at times heartbreaking journey for Regina Alsabagh and her teammates Farah Sabah, Maryam Kafra and Israa Alfadhli, all of whom came to Michigan after fleeing Iraq with their families.

NBC News first spoke to the teens the day after the Antares explosion, and they were devastated. The girls had spent four months collaborating in both Arabic and English to design an experiment that tests whether iodine tablets can purify water in space.

The girls -- aided by district superintendent Randy Speck and enrichment teacher Angel Abdulahad (who translated the girls' answers in an interview with NBC News last week) -- raced to re-do the project in time for the Space X launch.

"I watched the rocket fly up in the air, and my future flew with it. I wished I could have been flying right along with it," Alsabagh told NBC News.

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Student Experiments Get Second Chance in Space