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NASA Wants Your Ambitious High-Tech Contest Ideas
In an effort to create future Centennial Challenges, NASA is asking the general public to come up with (and submit) ambitious contest ideas. For the next six weeks, the Innovative Partnerships Program will be accepting ideas for new contests, with all submissions becoming public domain information. "According to NASA, any idea can be proposed for a prize competition that addresses challenges related to the mission of NASA in aeronautics, exploration, science, or space operations. Crosscutting topics or those that also address related national or global needs are especially valuable. The challenges must require basic and applied research, technology development or prototype demonstrations."
So NASA is holding a contest to see who can come up with the best contest?
the recursion is hurting my brain...
Come on guys, let's get some ideas. This isn't rocket science......oh, maybe it is.
I heard you like contests, so I made a contest for your contest, so you can design the future while you design the future. Thanks, NASA.
Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
The problem is NASA is trying to accomplish too much too fast. They should go for multi-stage contests, where individual teams can compete for each stage of a larger goal. For example, the first stage contest could be for the first group to successfully land a man on the moon. Ten years later, the second stage contest could be for the first group to successfully retrieve a human, or his remains, from the moon. The third stage could be a contest to see who could send a man outside of the Earth-Moon system. Several years after that, the fourth stage contest could be for someone to actually send a man on a trajectory to hit Mars. Fifth stage could be an economical way to retrieve small bits of spacecraft and human body parts from the surface of Mars. Eventually, around the 15th or 20th stage, we'll have a colony on Mars, from which we could attempt to contact the guy we shot off into deep space in the third stage. Simple, really.
...First prize: a mountain bike made of diamonds.
I already made an invention for the future, I made that reverse microwave!
I need to put freon in it to make it work. It makes ice so fast and makes beer icy cold and pizza too hot makes it a little colder so you don't burn the roof of your mouth.
Also, as practical inventions go, there's the garbage juicer. How it works is quite incredible. All you do is take garbage out of any old garbage bag, and when the lights go on you're ready to go.
The first tap is kerosene. You can use kerosene to burn your sweet mama's panties off.
The second is root beer. Great for Friday night pizza parties.
Last but not least grapefruit juice.
A Dyson Sphere contest!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
How about a contest to make NASA part of the public eye again? Oh I don't know, "America's Next Top Astronaut".
If anything, it would get people involved again, and the ratings and advertising revenue might supplement NASA's ever declining budget.
(I'm advocating a "if you can't beat'em, join'em" approach. It probably won't work, but as someone who spent only five minutes thinking about it, I really don't know)
Good Luck (You will need it - yes you NASA)