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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."
Clean up all the debris that is already up there and you'll lower the difficulty of future challenges.
Don't get me wrong here. I am not saying I am encouraging this or that i am proud that NASA is doing this, but at least it will bring more attention to our space program than the average American has been giving it in recent years. It's sad, people used to crowd around the TV to watch when a shuttle launched, now they just catch a glimpse on the news when they are flipping channels from tool academy and Hasselhoff on America's got talent.
This could (and is) said of every half-baked NASA effort, including the whole "name-node-3" thing. To my mind, asking the general public to come up with ideas for Centennial Challenges means that:
(a) NASA can't come up with a clear picture of what technologies are high priority and could benefit from a Centennial Challenge.
(b) NASA sees the Centennial Challenges as public outreach with no real engineering payoff - so it doesn't matter what the topics are.
(c) both (a) and (b).