You might not think a group of community college students would be able to compete against Ivy-league engineers in a NASA-sponsored competition.
But the robotics team at Oakton College is wired differently.
The Oakton College Robotics Team is competing in the 2026 NASA Lunabotics Challenge. Their mission is to design and build a robot capable of excavating and moving moon dust.
As a community college going up against more than 70 universities, including powerhouses like MIT and Cal Tech, Oakton is an underdog. But these scrappy students started with a computer automated design, then the they built a wooden prototype.
They’re now tinkering with the real robot as smaller groups working on specifics like mechanical components and electrical energy.
But what set this team apart is a student with no engineering background, the one who documented and wrote the team’s plan to NASA. And when those project management plans were judged by NASA, Oakton shocked the system and ranked No. 1 in the nation.
Oakton will travel to the University of Central Florida for the first phase of competition May 12-17. The top ten teams will advance to compete at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center later in May.
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