When My Le, a 21-year-old electrical engineering Santa Ana College student from Garden Grove, was a kid she dreamed of being an astronaut and being a part of NASA.
This week Le is one step closer to achieving that dream and heading off to Houston after leading a team of three other Santa Ana College students and a UC San Diego student through to one of the final phases of a NASA competition – securing one of the 11 finalist spots out of 100 schools.
“Space is something that’s unreal and I think for someone like me, it’s hard to do it and I would never imagine that I would do something related,” Le said in an interview at a reception to celebrate and send off her team, MEKAH, last week.
Le said once she realized how much she adored NASA, she set a goal for herself to be a part of the agency in some way by applying to internships before deciding to compete in NASA competitions.
The competition they entered, NASA Orbit Space, is aimed at getting students across the country to design technology for exploring outer space and compete for over $380,000, receive mentorship from experts and be a part of a program to help launch their careers.
Alicia Ramos, student services coordinator for the engineering department at the college, said the team has persevered through a host of challenges.
“Here at Santa Ana College we have a lot of students that have a lot of adversity, and they somehow still find a way to overcome that,” she said.
“Part of that is because of our community that we have here. I’d like to say that they feel welcome enough to be able to lean on a lot of services here on campus to get them ahead in opportunities that they probably never thought that they would be able to obtain. I’m glad that they took the initiative to be in this competition,” Ramos said.
Tony Mendoza, a 40-year-old Santa Ana College student on the team, said he never thought he would come this far after moving around from Saudi Arabia to Canada to Dubai – working different jobs before deciding to go to the U.S. to finish his degree and pursue his dream.
“I’m not bringing only our school, the community college, my family, but especially pride for my country, the Philippines. I’m very, very proud because before I was an overseas Philippine worker. Now I’m a student at community college, and then I’m going to NASA,” said Mendoza, a mechanical drafting design major, in an interview.
“For me it’s a blessing.”
Michael Trang, a 21-year-old mechanical engineering major on the team from Santa Ana, said participating in this competition has been incredibly surreal.
“Almost every kid wants to become an astronaut once they grow up,” Trang said in an interview. “Being able to work and to come this far for the NASA competition is surreal. I mean, NASA is at the forefront of our space technology.”
Helen Schwartz, an advisor to the team and mechanical engineer at Cal Tech, said she was driving when she heard MEKAH was one of the finalists.
“I literally pulled the car over and stopped, and just l cheered and almost cried and just was so proud of the group. I mean, competing against 100 teams that often have a lot more resources dedicated to this project than Santa Ana College does,” Schwartz said.
“I saw a video of the team when they heard the announcement, and it was just an eruption of noise and cheering. Anything that was said after the word MEKAH was just not heard because everyone was celebrating so loudly.”
The students will be competing against other colleges from California like Cal Poly Pomona and UC Irvine, a couple of schools in Texas as well as a university in New Jersey and one in Puerto Rico.
Ramos said she hopes the competition will serve as a stepping stone for the team for future opportunities.
“These students will experience this opportunity, and it will inspire them to do more. It will inspire them to question more. It’ll inspire them to create more, engineer more,” she said.
Ramos also said she hopes it sets an example for other Santa Ana College students.
“I hope that they see My Le’s face and actually say there is somebody that is representative of me,” she said. “Our students are going to say how did they get there and how can I get there too. I think that because we have students who are so easy to approach, it’s going to definitely make other students feel like they can do it too.”
The Launching Point
NASA Orbit wasn’t the original competition that Le and UC San Diego student Ken Khant had their sights set on when they first tried to get team MEKAH to compete.
In fact, it is not even the same team.
In the fall of 2025, Le was looking to compete in the NASA Minds Project, a smaller competition where college students design and build technology for the Artemis mission but by September she was told funding for the competition got cut due to a government shutdown.
The original MEKAH team, except for Le and Khant, disassembled after the news – but then NASA informed them of the Orbit competition and the duo started to recruit new team members and began to massage and grow their idea.
Schwartz said they didn’t have to change the design for their submission too much after they switched competitions and it allowed them to refine their invention.
“I actually felt that we were maybe ahead of the game because we had spent all those months creating a final design for this submission for NASA Minds, and when that fell through, we were like, ‘Well, great! Now we still have all this stuff planned and designed. We can really get down to all the nitty-gritty and refine it and make it something very impressive,’” Schwartz said.
Project Threshold
For their submission called Project Threshold, the MEKAH team created two robotic devices named Morpheus and Aether.
The Aether robot is designed to be in a spacecraft’s airlock to evaluate the air quality when an astronaut returns from a spacewalk or planetary surface to make sure it is safe and there are no particles that can cause respiratory issues.
The Morpheus robot is designed to monitor the health of astronauts on the spaceship by checking vitals and performing cognitive tests.
Le said she came up with the idea for Project Threshold because she used to be a pre-med student and cares about human health.
“Astronauts are our heroes so we need to do something to protect them,” she said. “Because if humans are not feeling healthy, they cannot do anything. They cannot explore anything basically so I was thinking, like, what if we create some system that can protect our astronauts.”
Schwartz says the team has a real shot of winning with Project Threshold.
“The design is super unique and innovative, and human health is such an important thing that I think the judges in Houston will recognize that, and they have recognized it so far,” they said.
“This could very well be a real concept in the International Space Station.”
What Does it Take to be a Finalist
Le said the team put in a lot of hard work to become one of the finalists balancing school and midterms while trying to meet deadlines for the competition and hearing they were moving on to the next phase was unreal.
“We did try our best. We put a lot of effort into this project,” she said. “Our hard work paid off. It’s not luck; it’s our hard work. We deserved to get that award.”
To stay motivated and inspired, Le said she frequently watched the movie Hidden Figures – a film about Katherine Johnson, a mathematician who calculated the trajectories for early U.S. spaceflights.
Now, Le and her crew will be competing at and touring a NASA facility in Texas named after Johnson.
Arthur Alcocer, a 25-year-old biomedical engineering major on the team, said his teammates’ motivation, his skills from previous internships and the support from the faculty allowed him to contribute to creating a truly unique invention for the competition.
“For the past year, I spent all my breaks – winter breaks, spring breaks – all my free time to work on this project. A lot of it was because I’m really passionate about my work. Being able to work and create a system that can help support astronauts as a community college student, I was overjoyed and as we slowly developed our project. I was like, this is totally doable,” said Alcocer, co-lead for creating the Morpheus robot.
Mendoza, the team’s designer specialist, said there were a lot of revisions to the designs of project threshold and that he would stay up late finishing his design drawings.
“It takes a lot of time and sacrifice to do it. So we work on this for a couple of months, not days, not weeks, but months so being here and then flying to NASA to Houston, that’s a lot. That’s a very rewarding experience with My Le and then our team,” he said.
Mendoza said now that they’re finalists, the focus is on delivering a stellar presentation about Project Threshold.
“Whatever the outcome, we’ll be happy,” he said “If we get more rewards or first prize, second prize for us, that’s a bonus. But being there representing Santa Ana College and the STEM students. For us, that’s a real achievement, and that’s a celebration for us.”
Alcocer said he used to joke with his teammates that if MEKAH wins the competition they should pop champagne bottles.
“This time I think we have a good shot at winning,” he said.
“We’ll make sure to bring the champagne to celebrate.”
Hosam Elattar is a Voice of OC reporter. Contact him at helattar@voiceofoc.org.
