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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.
I know it's a bit outside of NASA's purview, for the moment at least, but how about a contest to build structures that are held up by kinetic energy. You launch material to the top of your structure, catch it there, and throw it back down; transfering enough energy in the process to hold the structure aloft. This kind of thing could eventually be used to build Launch Loops or Space Fountains and is a pretty big engineering challenge that is probably solvable today with a little effort. And it's no more outlandish than a space elevator (probably less so in fact).
NASA Wants Your Ambitious High-Tech Contest Ideas
because they don't have enough time or funding to do the research themselves!
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.
I agree that Nasa can't afford what it has now. That said, NASA may be better off spending its money on contests.
But this is an opportunity for any teams of graduate researchers who *want* to take their research into the market.
All they have to do is:
1. Design a contest that they are likely to win.
2. Submit contest (or have a friend submit the contest, to avoid the apparant conflict of interest).
3. Wait for similar contest to come out
4. Enter similar contest and publicize heavily.
5. Encourage donations
6. Win, or come close
7. Sell product under heavy publication
8. Profit!
Whether you win or not determines the initial profitability -- but not the long term profitability.
The free publicity of being on the news helps determine long-term profitability.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
How about a contest to design a modern versions of the cameras used on the Apollo project? By that, I mean a lightweight solution to taking photographs and video on the lunar surface, usable by an astronaut in full gear, with enough battery life and capacity to take a few thousand pictures and or X many hours of video.
Bonus points will be awarded if your solution also includes extra equipment, such as monopods/tripods, high gain antenna, solar recharge kit, is capable of surviving other hostile environments, such as the surface of mars, is capable of using different filters for uv/IR/etc, remote control options, etc.
Clean up all the debris that is already up there and you'll lower the difficulty of future challenges.
A Dyson Sphere contest!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
MIT is working on a Mechanical Counterpressure Spacesuit, its called the Biosuit. The materials its made out of are not as advanced as they need to be, but some of the mechanical structures, and the concepts used to design the suits are ready.
http://mvl.mit.edu/EVA/biosuit/index.html
Basically by being a skin tight suit the wearer is better equipped to handle long hours in a space suit, right now something like 80% of an astronaut's exertions are fighting the suit, with 20% left for actually working on the Space Station or Hubble or something.
In 'the future' we're going to spend a lot more time outside doing things, on orbit, on the moon, on mars and it'd be a lot better off if we didn't have to fight the suit to do the work.
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)
It's certainly not the first time I've seen this meme, but can someone tell me where it originates? Is it yet another product of 4chan?
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Dear NASA,
Here's a contest for you: The Find A Proper Administrator Contest.
O'Keefe and Griffin really did a number on NASA. We've known for a while that the shuttles needed replacing, yet here we are, limping them along with no replacement* in sight. We'll have at least a five year gap in manned space flight capabilities due in part to the shortsightedness of these men, not to mention a space station that is not even complete, yet is shortly due for decommission.
*I hear some of you saying "What about Ares?". Are you talking about the Ares that is going to lift our astronauts into an orbit with a negative perigee? Are you talking about the Ares that cannot lift the Orion module unless they strip out the airbags, toilets, land landing equipment, and a third of the astronauts? Are you talking about the Ares that is going to put the astronauts through the roughest launch environment (thrust oscillation, max-Q, G-forces, acoustics) that manned space flight has ever seen? That Ares?
Or are you talking about the Ares that can't be built in existing factories because it is too big around? Are you talking about the Ares that needs a specially re-inforced launch pad, with thicker concrete driveways, and a new, stronger crawler because it is so heavy the current infrastructure is unable to handle the weight? Are you talking about the Ares that won't be ready to fly until at least 2020? That Ares?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
You should study history. Humankind doesn't want better quality of life. They've had thousands of years to work at that goal, but choose to wage war, rape, plunder, pillage and kill instead. Now, get off your liberal arse, and help to develop a better bomb.
I know that some bumper-sticker-thinker will probably mod you insightful, but I thought I'd point out that you're pretty much 100% wrong. Quality of life (and the average life span) has risen with minor fluctuations throughout recorded history, while the amount of "war, rape, plunder, pillage and kill[ing]" per capita has steadily declined. In other words, not only do we live longer and better than we ever have before, but we hurt each other less, too.
Also, I'm fairly sure you're misusing the word "Liberal".
Other than that, you're completely right!
While I know this was intended to be funny, not "insightful", there is a little kernel of truth here. NASA really doesn't have the time or funding to do all of this research themselves.
Still, the point of doing this is due to the fact that there are many in the space exploration "fan clubs" (to use at least one term for the loosely organized groups of various kinds that support spaceflight) that have some pretty interesting ideas, and it would be a shame to throw out some very good ideas while a boring committee of government bureaucrats comes up with some stuff that doesn't really make a difference.
If NASA can get a whole bunch of excellent ideas from a wide variety of sources, perhaps one or two of those ideas can make actual contests. All of the original Centennial Challenges have been wildly successful in terms of leveraging modest amounts of government funding with a whole bunch of private investment to come up with some very useful technologies for NASA to work with in the future. From just a pure fiscal standpoint, creating these contests are an incredible boon for NASA and do several things very well: