A Toronto high school student who designed an orbiting space colony for 10,000 people has taken the grand prize in a NASA Space Settlement Competition.

Eric Yam, who attends Grade 12 at Northern Secondary School, beat out more than 300 students from around the world to become the first Canadian to win the contest in its 16 years. He tied with a team from Orissa, India.

"The most challenging part was to combine all the different aspects - the technology that would work in space combined with a social design, a government system and life-support systems," Yam said yesterday.

"He basically built a Utopia from scratch," said math and physics teacher Gillian Evans, staff advisor on the project.

Yam's innovative design, built as a series of stacked rings resembling a cylinder, would house a self-sustaining colony of 10,000 people and up to 300 visitors, including paying tourists, in the year 2050.

A hotel section would include a panoramic outer gallery with transparent walls, perfect for watching the earth, moon and stars.

Yam called his design Asten, another name for the Egyptian god Thoth, master of divine and physical law.

A pdf of the design can be viewed at: http://www.tdsb.on.ca/wwwdocuments/about_us/media_room/docs/ASTEN.pdf