NASA Seeks Geniuses and Visionaries

Dotnaught writes "The NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts has put out a call for 'revolutionary ideas to advance the Vision for Space Exploration.' Would-be visionaries are invited to submit their ideas by February 13, 2006, as explained in this Call for Proposals. Phase 1 grants range from $50K to $75K. Phase 2 grants go up to $400K. Sample grand visions include how to create a 'self-sustaining, human presence throughout the solar system' and 'truly autonomous robotic operations for exploration and habitation.'" If any Slash users end up with the grants, we call dibs on interviews.

Comments

This is the sort of thing we were trained for.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an astrophysicist, currently not working in academia. This is the sort of thing we dream of - the opportunity to pitch our ideas to someone who is interested in and understands the value of science.
 
I once had a high tech compnay tell me they "didn't have much call for physics", I didn't have the heart to tell them it was physics than made their computers work and not magic.
 
I know I'll be working on my ideas to submit. Thanks for the chance NASA!

Allright

[hackstraw]

I'm confused when I get modded a troll or flamebate when I'm being a little pessimistic based on reality and reason.

I guess the egg might be still too wet on NASA's face to bust them for wrecking stuff pretty regularly for the past 6 years or so.

NASA needs changing. I've been in a relationship with a PhD that worked at NASA for quite some time. I've been reading NASA publications like Spinoff since about 1977 or 1978. I've known plenty of people that work at NASA that are nervous every 5 to 7 years because they talk about doing massive center closings. I've been involved with research at NASA for a few years. 2 of my closest coworkers worked at NASA for a total of 20 years or so. In other words, I know a little about the agency, but am not as biased or blinded as a direct employee.

NASA needs to change. Their wrecking stuff is embarrassing. They used to be able to put people on the moon with slide rules and "computers" which were typically women that worked out math by long hand with redundancy and double checking conflicting answers. The Space Shuttle was a failure in every respect except some of it was able to be reused. However, the reuse had an unexpected side effect in that it prohibited progress that kept us using 1970s technology for a long time despite the progress in things like material science, chemistry, physics, CAD, and many, many orders of magnitude of computing progress vs doing calculations with slide rules and pencil and paper. They Space Shuttle was also a failure in that it was way too expensive, its cargo capacity was too small and not expandable.

I dunno.