WIND POINT - Three local students got an insider's view of the Kennedy Space Center last week after winning a national NASA contest.

Students from The Prairie School spent Tuesday to Saturday at the center in Florida where they met with NASA staff and got special behind-the-scenes tours.

"The first building we went into we got to stand right under the (Space) Shuttle Discovery and 10 feet away there was someone working on it," said Julie Iuliano, a senior at Prairie who went on the trip.

"You could see the details of the (shuttle) tiles," added Tatiana Barry, another senior on the trip.

The students got to visit the space center because they placed first in the 2009 No Boundaries National Competition administered by NASA and USA Today. For the competition, student groups had to research a NASA career and then create something like a Web site, newspaper or work of art to market that career to teens.

The student group from Prairie, 4050 Lighthouse Drive, created a Web site about astrobiologists, who study life in outer space and on Earth by looking at organisms, their survival in outer space and the planet atmospheres that make such survival possible.

"I felt like I learned some really awesome things that I didn't even know about," Iuliano said, "like astrobiologists are looking at animals on Earth and how they can live in extreme conditions and I just thought it was the coolest thing."

She said she and three other students entered the competition for a physics class project. Three of the students - Iuliano, Barry and senior Jean Xin - were able to attend the space center tour. Senior Kaitlyn Doubek also worked on the project, but did not travel to the space center.

The Prairie students' Web site beat out 150 other projects to win the competition. The judges praised the Web site's design, easy navigation and special features like a custom-made video, interviews with astrobiologists and a quiz. For the win, the students got $2,000 and passes to the space center, which they used for their November trip.

On the trip, the students presented their Web site project to about a dozen NASA employees. The students also toured the main building, the education building, a space shuttle launch area and the International Space Station Center, among other areas, said Jean Weaver, Prairie's Science Department chair, who accompanied the students.

"In each building they had arranged for someone who works in that building to spend 20 minutes with us and tell us what they did. They really, really arrange a nice tour," Weaver said. "I think (the students) were overwhelmed and amazed we got to go see this stuff."