NASA Announces Space Apps Challenge

coondoggie writes with an article in Network World about a development challenge put forth by NASA. From the article: "NASA said it would host an open source-based application competition that it hopes will deliver a new generation of software that can address space, weather, and economic issues. NASA said it will coordinate with other interested space agencies around the world on an International Space Apps Challenge that will encourage scientists and concerned citizens from all seven continents — and in space — to create, build, and invent new applications that can address world-class issues."

Comments

Re:NASA

[itchythebear]

No, NASA has never been about just "sending people to space". They accomplished their original goal of winning the space race and now their official mision statement is "pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research".

I'd say that this is exactly the kind of stuff NASA should be doing, they are saving time and money by not doing all this research themselves and at the same time (hopefully) promoting collaboration between scientists and space enthusiasts all over the world.

Kudos NASA

Re:NASA

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It isn't about being dangerous and scary(history suggests that there's always somebody, usually many somebodies, expendable if you care about a project enough...), it's about not engaging in largely pointless white-elephant projects at the expense of actual science and engineering. Because robots are better at space than humans, they tend to allow much more of the mission to be about space, rather than about coddling them until they can land again.

The only thing you'd really need humans in space for is determining what happens to humans in absence of gravity, which you can do in earth orbit, and eventually sending some out to set up shop in a new location set up by the robots for their convenience. Anything other than zero gravity can be (comparatively) cheaply simulated by putting people in assorted test chambers on earth(not that we are, for the most part, bothering to do that, which suggests how serious we are about long-term plans for humans in space) and the space-related work can be done more efficiently by robots.

Re:NASA

[BJ_Covert_Action]

You know what doesn't mix well? People and trans-oceanic travel. We are not sea-water consumption tolerant, solar radiation tolerant, or even high-moisture air tolerant (you wouldn't believe how many cases of hypothermia can be brought on by a cool breeze and a high humidity level!). In fact, all that extra stuff you have to take with a person just so they don't starve or dehydrate is a lot of dead weight (and if your boat is loaded up with too much dead weight, it will definitely sink!). On top of all that, there is the huge PR cost if one of these leaky wooden tubs springs a hole and sinks to the bottom of the Atlantic.

Don't try to send humans West across the ocean to do a caravan's job.

Do you think folks back in the 1300's and 1400's talked like that a lot? I'll bet they did.

Re:NASA

[jank1887]

Sailing West to get to the East: a risky proposition, but with a potentially huge and practically realizable commercial payoff. The discovery of a New World was the result of a lack of knowledge about what was really out that way.

Putting humans into space: a risky proposition, with no current model for commercial payoff. Sufficient knowledge of what's out there, and our ability to get further knowledge sans manned spaceflight, reduce or even eliminate the need to get people out there until some aspect of the aforementioned situation changes.

Re:NASA

[GameboyRMH]

If they had robots that could be sent out for a fraction of the cost to scout for new worlds before sending people, I'm sure they would have preferred that option.

Re:NASA

[rgbatduke]

Well, yes, but the point of the previous document is that we aren't even thinking of sending humans into space to actually live, to colonize. At least not yet.

Much as I adore the idea of colonizing the entire Universe, putting humans on each and every planet and surrounding stars with Dyson spheres and filling them and eventually using advanced nuclear technology to transform nearly all of the mass that isn't actually in stars into human flesh in the form of exponentially more babies, it really isn't fair to compare space and the imperial colonial expansion of Europe into the New World in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Look at the differences:

• New world habitable (indeed, inhabited). Solar system not habitable. Any of it. People didn't colonize Antarctica back then (and still haven't, not really) in spite of all of that absolutely free land and no doubt all sorts of valuable natural resources, gold and all that. Not to mention Cthulhu's lair, somewhere under the ice. Antarctica is an absolute vacation spot compared to, say, the moon, or Europa, or Venus. Penguins just love it.
• New world chock full of instantly exploitable and enormously valuable treasure. Gold. Silver. Tobacco. Lots of natives to enslave. Fruits and vegetables and meats. Lumber. All of which were profitable to ship home, even after paying for a ship, crew, and the not insubstantial risks. Solar system: the Moon could be made of solid platinum and it probably wouldn't be profitable to get there, mine it, and ship it home. And it's not. And there isn't any tobacco, native women to roll cigars on the thighs of, fruit, vegetables, meat, lumber. Hell, there isn't any air or water. The only idea that I've heard that is even in principle viable as an export from the Moon is He3 to use as nuclear fuel -- any decade now, right after somebody figures out how to burn He3 as nuclear fuel in a way that is superior to e.g. readily available and cheap Deuterium (which we can't burn either). The Moon is so close, it's like in orbit. Mars, the Asteroids, etc are simply astronomically expensive, even compared to the moon.
• New World produced a harvest of knowledge (indirectly, not the point of any of the voyages to settle or exploit it). The Solar system is also producing knowledge, but the previous post pointed out that it is cheaper and smarter to harvest it with robots and computers than to send meatbags that piss blood and die horribly in a vacuum. Or in 500 degree sulphuric acid at high pressure, or in supercold hydrogen and methane and ammonia at higher pressure or...
• The New World was a gangbusters place to send criminals, second through tenth sons, religious wanks who didn't want to be Catholic like everybody else, Catholics who wanted to make all of those cigar rolling island women (and men, and kids) into freshly "converted" Catholic slaves to dig all of that gold for you and work your plantations. It was inexpensive (relative to space!) to get there -- a few tens of families could pool enough money to hire a ship -- and when you got there you could be almost instantly self-sufficient, except when you weren't because of a drought or something and died horribly. Space requires the surplus income of an entire wealthy nation to send a tiny handful of humans into near Earth orbit, and space makes the worst drought ever experienced on Earth seem like a humid wet rainstorm. Nobody wants to or can afford to go live in space -- if they could, it would be chock full of Mormons, the Amish, Texans, and other disaffected groups that don't want to live in modern society where they might have to see gay people holding hands or pay taxes.

Not exactly comparable. Even less comparable to the westward expansion of the 1800s, where a single family could often afford the trip, and could forage or buy food when they got wherever.

Tell you what. You invent a spaceship that costs about as much as a house (that's the limit of sing