Stephen Hawking to Accept Cosmos Award in Cambridge, England - The Planetary Society - Note that the award presentation was a week ago (the linked press release is from February 24).
Greetings From Space Up in Sunny San Diego! - The Planetary Society reviews the unconference, including photos of people and hardware from Unreasonable Rocket and Masten Space Systems.
Masten Space Systems Update - NASASpaceflight.com - Jon from Masten links to another picture from the unconference in this discussion.
Let's put robots AND humans in space - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - Astrobotic's David Gump considers NASA's new budget proposal. Much of the debate over this budget concerns a controversy over whether NASA should use its own systems, commercial systems, or both to give NASA astronauts access to space. This article focuses on a less-debated, but essential, part of the new plan that goes beyond the old astronauts-vs-robotics debate: a new line of robotic astronaut precursor missions to do things like travel to the Moon's surface and demonstrate production of rocket propellant from lunar ice.
NASA Wants to Fund Centennial Challenges at $10 Million Per Year - Parabolic Arc
Bankrupt Sea Launch Gets More Financing – Heinlein Prize Trust Involved - Parabolic Arc
Centennial Challenges gathering… - The Space Elevator Blog
“One of the problems we had last year was wind-induced oscillation…” - The Space Elevator Blog points to some video clips from Bitter Jester Creative, Inc.
Announcing the Artsutanov and Pearson awards - The Space Elevator Blog
Marshall hosts the 2010 Great Moonbuggy Race - Lunar Networks
Ted Southern - Eyebeam Art + Technology Center
You can see more photos of Ted's astronaut glove at his Glove & Hands page. From there you can also get to his other projects.
A wry report on regolith removal - RLV News
Explore Mars, Inc. opens - Space for All:
... We are pleased to announce the formation of Explore Mars, Inc. (exploremars.org). ... In the first half of 2010, Explore Mars will launch a series of technology development challenges relating to Mars exploration, with prizes ranging from $10,000 - $100,000. ... the first of these challenges will focus on in situ resource utilization - technologies that will allows us to "live off the land" on other planets. ... collaborating with Aerojet and NASA's Spaceward Bound, we will be creating the Mars Education Challenge that will challenge educators to design new and innovative Mars curriculum. ... Explore Mars plans to announce details of at least two prizes in the first half of 2010. The Explore Mars team includes individuals such as Apollo 11 Astronaut, Buzz Aldrin; NASA Planetary scientist, Dr. Chris McKay; Space historian, Andy Chaikin; former Biosphere 2 director of science and research, Bruno D.V. Marino; and many others.
Aero Club of Atlanta presents Epps Award - GeneralAviationNews.com:
... Huffman has inspired students who later become astronauts, including two students from Henderson High School, the only known school in the world to graduate two NASA astronauts. ... She is the founder of the SEMAA (NASA’s Science, Engineering, Mathematics and Aerospace Academy) LINKS Engineering team and sponsored the Wild Blue Wonders Team America Rocketry Challenge. ...
The latest NewSpace News links to an article by Peter Diamandis, Beam Power team LaserMotive, and information about the 2010 Space Access conference that includes numerous space prize teams.
Johns Hopkins Engineering - Winter 2010 - One of the features in this article is on the JHU Robotics Team. The team participates in the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle competition and the International Aerial Robotics competition.
Working on Blue and.... - Unreasonable Rocket
Volanz Aerospace Thanks Secor Strategies - Secor Strategies
OpenNASA invites you to contribute ideas on making NASA more efficient, innovative, and open within the agency and to the outside world. You can discuss and vote on other contributors' ideas, too. Some of the ideas there feature prizes or competitions of one sort or another. Here are a few examples:
Create a Science Data API Challenge
Junior Astronaut Corps - Allow students to compete for 25 coveted slots in the Junior Astronaut Corps -- using much of the same criteria (but age-appropriate) as we use to select astronauts. ...
Millennial Challenges ... Centennial Challenges on Steroids
Step-by-step prizes for Flexible Path goals
Incentive awards 4 creative thinking (new participatory office)
Here's a stack of space prize tweets I gathered over the last week or so, interspersed with a few comments.
@InnoCentiveCEO: NEw $20K NASA Challenge: Coordination of Sensor Swarms for Extraterrestrial Research http://bit.ly/jHtV Very cool!
The deadline on that new NASA InnoCentive competition is April 26. From the challenge overview:
... but a much more revolutionary idea is the concept of Sensor Swarming, where the swarm itself exhibits ’emergent behavior’ or ’intelligence’. This Challenge asks solvers to develop and simulate a high performing sensor swarm coordinate protocol.
Check InnoCentive's NASA Innovation Pavilion to keep up to date on all of their NASA challenges.
InnoCentive has many other innovation competitions. Here's one:
@InnoCentiveCEO: New $100K Competition: Predictive Data Analysis http://bit.ly/bXLs3c Teams Eligible!
@jetlab: Watch Students Compete Using Lego Robotics: Watch school teams test their software-enabled Lego robots via a... http://bit.ly/chdgOI
This is on the Southern California NASA Explorer Schools Robotics Competition, part of FIRST. The competition will be held on Tuesday at JPL.
@glxp: Anousheh Ansari's new memoir, "My Dream of Stars", is now available on Amazon: http://bit.ly/bjsDCa
Here's a look back at the NASA Centennial Challenge recognition ceremony:
@Doug_Comstock: Check out images of all winning teams and allied organizations from last week's CC recognition event. http://tinyurl.com/CC-images-2-26-10
... and here's a 3-tweets-for-one collection from the winner of the 2009 Beam Power Centennial Challenge, showing that they're looking into business applications for their technology:
@LaserMotive: Tom is heading to San Diego today for a UAV conference. Power beaming could enable 'eternal' UAVs.
Here's the UAV conference website: http://www.ttcus.com/view-conference.cfm?id=138
Day one of the UAV conference went well. Tom spoke to a number of people about power beaming for UAVs, and they were very interested.
The neXt PRIZE blog has been active lately. This brings our attention to the most recent post there:
@Pomerantz: A new blog post my from colleagues in Prize Development: http://bit.ly/aqyDRp "PRIZE Development - Where It All Begins..." #XPRIZE
The post compares the X PRIZEs to X CHALLENGEs:
... An X CHALLENGE, on the other hand, is a prize of up to $2.5M, awarded for solving a well-defined technical problem that has no clear path to a solution or is perceived as difficult. Unlike an X PRIZE, which seeks to stimulate or catalyze an entire market (including the social and regulatory aspects of that market), an X CHALLENGE seeks to produce a breakthrough technological or behavioral solution to a specific market need.
I'm sure most of you have seen this news:
@Odyssey_Moon: Odyssey_Moon Chief Scientist Paul Spudis says >1.3 trillion lbs of water at Moon's north pole http://bit.ly/aWO17s @GLXP
The mass isn't the only consideration. Here's a comment from Dr. Spudis at NASA Watch:
The ice we're seeing is nearly pure and is located within the interiors of craters with diameters of 2-15 km. It's at least a couple meters thick, with maybe 50 cm of dry regolith on top of it.
To a mining engineer, it's almost the perfect ore body.
Dr. Spudis gives more details here: Ice at the north pole of the Moon - The Once and Future Moon (Air and Space Smithsonian Magazine)
Here are some updates from a couple of N Prize teams (Team Prometheus is also participating with Team FREDNET in the Google Lunar X PRIZE):
@TeamPrometheus: We have aquired a 24' Box Truck for Missiom Control. http://www.teamprometheus.org/ http://bit.ly/a0NTmv
@ValkyrieFed: We will be at the Montreal Twestival, March 25th, at the Bain Mathieu!
The next few tweets show what some of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge teams are doing after the competition:
@unrocket: Have to build new tethers and cat pack, then fly blue ball again. Hoped to be ready for FAR on the 6th, now thinking 20th, taking my time.
@glxp: http://twitpic.com/15p641 - The @unrocket folks are here with Blue! Here is the venue #spaceup
This video made me think that maybe Masten Space Systems should have taken the name of one of their NG-LLC competitors, SpeedUp:
@wikkit: Two hours of work in two minutes: taking apart #ngllc winning rocket Xoie in December: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7ny7uRcapU
@wikkit: The sexy aeroshell design I came up with didn't survive today's analysis. This whole having an atomsphere thing, it's tricky.
The link in the following tweet is to a COSMIC LOG article, "Inventors take the prize", that covers the Lemelson-MIT Collegiate Student Prize Program:
@Pomerantz: I'm partial to incentive prizes, but the other kind work well, too! http://bit.ly/bnxm0d (via @b0yle)
@Eurospaceward: Abstracts due May 15 for the newly announced Pearson and Artsutanov SE Prizes, paper deadline July 1, 2010. Contest details: www.isec.info
Here are more details from the ISEC Prizes page:
ISEC has created these prizes to foster research about topics related to building a Space Elevator. ... The Pearson Prize is open to all college undergraduate students currently enrolled in a two or four year undergraduate curriculum. Papers submitted for the Pearson prize must have a specific theme as its topic. For 2010, this theme is "Space Debris Mitigation". ... The Artsutanov prize is open to all entrants and papers can be on any space-elevator related subject.
The winner of the Pearson Prize will win a cash award of $1,500 while the winner of the Artsutanov Prize will win a cash award of $2,500. In addition, the winners (one per paper in case of multiple authors of a single paper) will be invited to the 2010 Space Elevator Conference to present their papers and to receive their award. ISEC will reimburse the winner's travel and hotel expenses ...
This past week brought exciting news that Picnik (basically a simplified Photoshop on the web but approximately 1000 times easier to use) was just acquired by Google. And what sounds like more fun on this Friday than combining a Picnik and the Moon?
CONTEST!
In addition, I have some prizes here in the office that I would love to give away to you all, and it's been too long since our last contest. So here it is:
- Go to Picnik.com
- Click "Upload" to edit a Moon (or space) -related photo (no registration required!)
- Unleash your creativity upon the photo. Colorize, crop, create something artistic and abstract, and then...
- Click the "Save and Share" button. You can post it to Twitter, Facebook, Picasa, and more. Just point it out to us and we'll share it here on this post.
- Contest will run until Sunday, March 7, 11:59pm PST. On Monday (3/8), the X PRIZE staff will choose the winner and a runner-up to receive Google Lunar X PRIZE t-shirts and other cool prizes!
ENTRIES! (Updated Friday at 2:30pm PST)
A lovely Moon scene from @Pomerantz:
Rocket to the Moon! (rocket stamp included in Picnik, btw) from @cristinlindsay:
Postcard from the Moon, by @Priesett. I'll send you all one of these, someday :)
A submission from @glittertrixie. We hope not, too!
What you say, @amoroso!
A psychedelic masterpiece from @mattcollister:
The final entry from @Snibble -- a poster that we all hope to see hanging in a Moon base someday...
As ever, you can find us on twitter, facebook, tumblr, or can leave us a comment/link here on this blog!
Can't wait to see your submissions! HAPPY FRIDAY.
But last night, I went to an event that took the science + entertainment fusion to a whole new level. Thanks to a National Academy of Science program called the Science & Entertainment Exchange, I got to spend last night hearing some hard hitting lectures on evolutionary biology at an event that was held at the home of famous producer Jerry Zucker and moderated by Seth MacFarlane. Yes, you read that right: lectures on evolution hosted by the folks behind such not-so-scientific entertainment franchises as Family Guy and Airplane!.
One lesson was made clear right from the start: a science parable in Peter Griffin's beard is worth more than two in a book. Or something to that effect, at least. One of our hosts told us how the President of the National Academy of Sciences, Ralph Cicerone, loves the episode of Family Guy pictured at the right here, and how that episode is one example of how entertainers can incorporate scientific themes--in this case, conservation of biodiversity, behavioral development, et cetera--into pop culture vehicles, helping drive home lessons that many viewers might otherwise never hear or never accept.The message from the scientists rang clear throughout the night. Scientists and Engineers have fundamentally important and exciting things to tell the world about--but are ill suited to do the telling. By working together with entertainers, they hope to play to each group's strengths, with the end result of conveying the key messages to an audience in an understandable way. To that end, the National Academy of Sciences is organizing events like last night's salon, and even offering free scientific consultation to film makers and other entertainers who want to improve the scientific accuracy of their products.
Although I fundamentally agree with that point, I must admit that the two speakers last night--Sean Carroll and Neil Shubin--both did a fantastic job of conveying scientific information in an entertaining way. With more advocates like these two speaking to the public, the need for these salons might not be so great. They certainly sent my imagination buzzing, and brought back some very pleasant memories of the opportunities I had to learn from a true legend of evolutionary biology and even to work in an evolutionary biology lab myself back in my undergraduate days. I picked up copies of Carroll's and Shubin's latest books, and I'm looking forward to reading them and expanding my mind.
During the question and answer period, I had a chance to ask a very X PRIZEy question: are there any breakthrough technologies or exploration campaigns on the horizon that will allow a massive surge of progress in the study of evolution? Fans of our work here at the X PRIZE Foundation will happy to know that two of the first answers given were more rapid gene sequences (a la the Archon X PRIZE for Genomics) and increase space exploration (a la the Google Lunar X PRIZE - space exploration actually came up several times last night, to my pleasant surprise). But Neil Shubin also mentioned one other possibility that is just plain cool: evidently, various companies are working to adopt medical imaging and visualization technologies to create portable tools that could allow paleontologists in the field to essentially see through a few feet of rock, picking out the choice fossils and extracting them with minimal labor and minimal damage.
Science talks that leave you day-dreaming about a plausible future version of "X-Ray specs" being used to find further missing links? Now that's edutainment!
Getting inspired about evolution at an event put on by an organization founded by Abraham Lincoln and hosted by the creators of Naked Gun and The Cleveland Show was pretty surreal. But that wasn't the strangest thing of the night. That honor has to go to a bizarre coincidence. Before the talks, my colleague Meghan Murphy and I struck up a conversation with the gentleman seated next to us, who turned out to be the the Chair of the Presidents’ Circle of the National Academies. His name? Davis Masten.
Image Notes: Image from Family Guy episode 3ACX03.
Those two books, in case you feel like picking up a copy:
A lot of youth today, particularly those from urban, economically disadvantaged communities do not have opportunities to investigate and experience the space industry world. Additionally, appealing to girls from these communities to explore this technological field needs to be strongly encouraged. In an article released on the Hill by Secretary Anne Duncan and John P Holdren-Advisor to President Obama for Science and Technology Policy, the US needs to tap the diversity of America to bring new approaches to discovery, design and innovations. Women and girls often face barriers that discourage participation in science and engineering. By engaging their diversity of experience and approaches, we can accelerate discovery and the development of new technologies and jobs.
This isn’t just a unique concern of the US, it’s a global concern. The entrance of women in science and technology fields has steadily increased over the years, however, more needs to be done in terms of promoting these types of careers at a very early age to girls in all communities. Girls can learn the full benefit of science and technology as it relates to the space industry by gaining knowledge and having positive interaction with education and space industry mentors.
What can the Google Lunar X PRIZE do? It’s a little short notice, but this coming Sunday- March 8th is International Women’s Day. Females throughout the world will be coming together to celebrate their achievements and discuss things they can do to tackle some of our biggest issues. Informal and formal events are currently being planned to empower women and girls to have dialogue about issues that directly affect the world. Many global corporations have also started to actively support International Women’s Day. Google in recent years has even changed its logo on its global search pages to support this day. To follow or be a part of this day in your local community to support female advances in the space industry, visit the International Women’s Day web site at http://www.internationalwomensday.com or follow them on twitter: @Women_on_IWD
Last week, NASA held an all day technical symposium at its Washington, DC headquarters to discuss the agency's incentive prize program, Centennial Challenges. The session provided a unique opportunity to learn lessons from NASA's first generation of incentive prizes.
As a quick history primer for those new to the program: right around the time that the Ansari X PRIZE for Suborbital Spaceflight was coming to a close, various parts of the US government realized that incentive prizes could be a nice part of the research and development toolkit for a variety of high-tech agencies. DARPA proceeded to move forward with the Grand Challenge program, followed by the Urban Challenge. NASA rolled an entire prize program called Centennial Challenges--so named because the main brainstorm session that led to the prize concepts Centennial Challenges would developed took place around the time of the 100 year anniversary of the Wright Brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk. Once authorized and appropriated (to the tune of about $10 million in funding) by Congress, Centennial Challenges proceeded to roll out a total of seven incentive prizes:
- the Regolith Excavation Challenge,
- the Green Flight Challenge (previously named the Personal Air Vehicle Challenge and the General Aviation Technology Challenge),
- the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander X PRIZE Challenge,
- the Power Beaming Challenge,
- the Strong Tether Challenge,
- the Astronaut Glove Challenge, and
- the Moon Regolith Oxygen Extraction Challenge.
Each one of these prizes was an example of a public-private partnership, for each prize was a partnership between NASA (prize purses), a non-profit 'Allied Organization' (prize management), the sponsors and donors of that Allied Organization (funds required for prize management), and the competing teams. Now, after about five years, this first generation of NASA prizes is coming to a conclusion.
With that history lesson aside (Editorial side note: Centennial Challenges' Wikipedia page is in desperate need of an update!), we can move to this past week's events. Last Thursday, NASA hosted a panel on each of these first generation prizes (with the sole exception of the MoonROX Challenge). On each panel were representatives of the Allied Organization, the winning team(s), and, in most cases, a NASA scientist or engineer to whose work the prize was relevant. It was a really fantastic opportunity to hear from a unique, interesting, and talented group of individuals. Though I encourage all of you to read through the various live-tweets of the event (or, if you can find it, to watch the video that should be archived somewhere by NASA TV), I did want to call out a few recurring themes from the session. - Leverage: Although some of them are still on-going, it looks as though all of these first generation NASA efforts will match the historical levels of leverage exhibited by incentive prizes dating back to the 1700s: cumulatively, the competing teams will contributed approximately ten times the prize purse's value in cash expended and in in-kind contributions in pursuit of the prize.
- Massively Parallel Innovation: The prizes discussed at this event each had between ~5 and ~25 teams competing for the relatively low amounts of prize money. In each case, these competing teams encompassed a broad range of technical solutions, and in many cases, individual teams pursued multiple different research and development avenues, and built multiple vehicles / gloves / tethers. As a result, the competitions generated a massive amount of research along a broad range of roughly parallel lines of thought--providing extremely useful data in both the positive and the negative cases.
- Jobs: Job creation is a metric all of us watch closely in these days of global economic concern. I was struck by how many new jobs were created by the Centennial Challenges program. In almost every prize, the prize money helped convince former hobbyists and amateurs to become professionals, resulting in multiple jobs each a multiple companies for each prize. I don't have an exhaustive amount of hard data, but based just on the data presented last week, I'd wager that the $4.5 million awarded to some 13 teams already by the Centennial Challenges program has led to the creation of ~30 jobs--in addition to the impressive new technologies and the ~$50 million in privately financed research and development.
- Collaboration and Openness: As most readers of the Launch Pad already know, the teams that competed for the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander X PRIZE Challenge were fantastically open with each other and with the public. In addition to extensive blogs (and Twitter accounts, et cetera), the teams often relied on each other as a second set of eyes to analyze every problem, and to suggest potential suggestions. Indeed, if our teams had not been so open with the public and with each other, we certainly would have had different results. But listening to the stories of the other prizes, I was shocked by how often this theme came up. Indeed, on the basis of what we heard last week, a simple trend could be observed: in every case, without exception, the teams that shared the most information with the general public eventually won the competition.
- Government space, NewSpace, and traditional space can all play nice: The relationship between these three groups is a bet testy at the moment, on the heels of President Obama's budget request. Regardless of what becomes of that, though, one thing was clear: all three of those groups like prizes. We had several examples of 'traditional space' players--companies like Northrop Grumman and ILC Dover--so enthusiastic about these prizes and the technologies and the talent that emerge from them that they became sponsors or the prizes. As mentioned above, these competitions are great examples of Public/Private Partnerships.
I welcome any other suggestions for Lessons Learned in the comments. Capturing all of these will be particularly important as NASA Centennial Challenges moves forward with converting the enormous number of suggestions they've received into the new competition that will make up NASA's second generation of prizes. Given our observations of this first batch, I think we are in for an impressive treat!
Image Notes: Representatives of prize winners and Allied Organizations stand on stage with NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, NASA Innovative Partnership Program Director Doug Comstock, and NASA Centennial Challenges staffers Andrew Petro and Patrick Connell. Photo Credit: NASA
