NASA Believes 'An Idea Can Change Your Life!'

The US Space agency, NASA, declared funding of $100,000 one-year grants to 30 new projects falling under the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. Based on their potential to enhance and develop future space missions, enabling new capabilities or significantly change current approaches to launching, constructing and operating space systems, these particular ideas were selected.

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Image: SpaceFuture

NASA chief technologist Bobby Braun said in an NASA - NASA Selects Visionary Advanced Technology Concepts For Study, "These innovative concepts have the potential to mature into the transformative capabilities NASA needs to improve our current space mission operations, seeding the technology breakthroughs needed for the challenging space missions in NASA's future." Joe Parrish, director for early-stage innovation in NASA's Office of the Chief Technologist, told journalists in a teleconference that the 30 recipients were selected from hundreds of proposals. These proposals admit a wide range of imaginative and creative ideas, such as changing the course of dangerous orbital debris, a spacesuit that uses flywheels to stabilize and aid astronauts as they function in micro-gravity, the use of 3-D printing to create a planetary outpost, and multiple innovative propulsion and power concepts required for future space mission operations. NASA requested ambitious long-term concepts for future technologies for development founded on their potential value to NASA’s future space missions and operational requirements.

These first NIAC projects were selected based on being technically realized and 10 years from what NASA accounts as ‘mission infusion’. The portfolio of ideas constituted multiple technology areas, including power, propulsion, structures and avionics, as described in NASA’s Technology Roadmaps.

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