Thursday, July 14, 2011

Prize Roundup: 100kft Prize, Crater Finder, Sample Agreement, AIAA Booster Plane, Debris Removal, and Prop Depot Designs, More

The Carmack 100kft Micro Prize - Armadillo Aerospace - Currently one launch attempt is scheduled, the Proteus 7 sounding rocket, at the Tripoli Rocket Association's Black Rock Desert high power rocket event.

NASA Tournament Lab: Open Innovation On-Demand - OSTP Blog discusses NASA's prize and open innovation work, including the recent NASA Tournament Lab announcement of the winner of a contest to create ideas to automate detection of craters.

Competition Shines Light on Dark Matter - OSTP Blog

Team Agreement – For Review - Sample Return Robot Challenge

HeinleinPrizeTrust - YouTube - The Heinlein Prize Trust YouTube channel has some newly uploaded videos of the 2011 Heinlein Prize Award ceremony to Elon Musk.

The 2010-2011 academic year's AIAA Design Competitions include a Low-Cost Access to Space Booster Aircraft, an Orbital Debris Removal Spacecraft, and a Propellant Depot Design and Analysis of Economic Benefit.

The next 2 links are from the Science in School - Competitions page.

Entries wanted for the 2012 European CanSat competition - ESA

Explore the dynamic high-energy Universe – competition for secondary students - ESA - The competition is open to secondary students from "ESA Member States and Cooperating States, Russia and the USA".

A Busy Summer Looms for Masten - Parabolic Arc describes a highlight in a visit to Mojave.

Google Lunar X Prize Appoints New Senior Director - Parabolic Arc presents a press release on the new director of the Google Lunar X PRIZE.

Altius Selected as Finalist for the 2011 NewSpace Business Plan Competition - Altius Space Machines (link from RLV News)

We-Are-Space Video Contest Finalists Now Online - Space Frontier Foundation (link from Space for All)

NASA/Etsy Space Craft winner's work on Atlantis - Space for All

Tuesday, July 05, 2011

2011 X-Hab Challenge Winners, and 2012 X-Hab

Here are a couple of articles about NASA's 2011 X-Hab Academic Innovation Challenge student competition:

University Of Wisconsin Students Win Space Habitat Competition - NASA

UW-Madison undergrads win NASA habitat design competition - University of Wisconsin

You can find more information about the 2012 challenge here:

eXploration Habitat (X-Hab) Academic Innovation Challenge - National Space Grant Foundation: 

The Habitat Demonstration Unit (HDU) project will offer multiple X-Hab awards of $5K - $45K each to design and produce functional products of interest to the HDU project as proposed by university teams according to their interests and expertise. The prototypes produced by the university teams will be integrated onto an existing NASA built operational habitat prototype. ... The Foundation anticipates that approximately 6-8 awards will be made under this solicitation. ...

eXploration Habitat (X-Hab) 2012 Academic Innovation Challenge Solicitation (PDF) - The 2011 competition theme was inflatable habitats, but the 2012 one is much more open-ended, which can be either a good or bad thing in a prize competition depending on your point of view.  The suggested topic list, covering a "Deep Space Habitat Systems" theme, includes "top-down" topics like a habitat demonstration module or a habitat structure that can be tested in underwater analog test sites like NEEMO.  It also includes habitat subsystems such as sensors, recycling systems, geological sample management systems, telemedicine, a virtual reality environment, and many others.