They’ve tinkered with tractors and lawn mowers. This summer, two local high school graduates will leave the earth behind as they study under leaders in space exploration.

Carl Bunge, of Monroe, will intern at a NASA space center after earning a coveted NASA Space Grant Fellowship that also comes with $70,000 a year in research support.

Meanwhile, Ryan Matthew Summers, of Stanwood, will intern at SpaceX, entrepreneur Elon Musk’s aerospace manufacturer and space-transport services company. Summers also won a $7,500 Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education scholarship.

Both study at Washington State University. Bunge is in mechanical engineering; Summers, in computer engineering.

For Bunge, an interest in space goes back to age 3, when his brother and sister convinced him he was an alien born from an egg his parents found in a field.

“I started thinking, maybe I’m different from these Earthlings around me,” he said. “I guess that started a journey of looking up at the sky.”

Living on a farm had instilled a love of anything with wheels in Bunge, who has engineered tractors. He now works in the Hydrogen Properties for Energy Research lab at WSU’s School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering.

The lab is working on a more efficient system that NASA may someday use to fuel deep space exploration. Bunge is working on a vortex tube, a device that separates and cools gases without using moving parts. Current systems for cooling and using hydrogen are heavy and complex and require moving parts.

“You’re going to have reliability issues with anything with moving parts,” Bunge said. “It’s going to break down, and in space that’s really difficult to fix.”

Summers is interested in how parallel computing can help improve machine learning algorithms and make them more useful. He’s also interested in pervasive computing, or how computers can be implemented into many parts of our lives.

For five years, he has tried to perfect an autonomous lawn mower with his software-engineer dad, Kevin (a 1980 grad of WSU’s electrical engineering program).

“I love to tinker around and build robots and other contraptions,” said Summers. He’s president of the Robosub Club of the Palouse, team lead in the WSU Robotics Club and an organizer of the WSU Hardware Hackathon.