1. Good morning everyone, thank you all for coming out this
morning to hear my talk My name is Mike Caprio and I'm a software
developer, instructor, and community organizer, just like many of
you out there in the audience. But since I first became involved in
space hacking 3 years ago, I've been an adviser for NASA and the
White House office of science and technology policy, and was
selected for a brainstorming team focused on rallying the world's
resources to defend the Earth from asteroids. And I'm here to tell
you that you too can become a space hacker! Id like to start with a
short video from earlier this year Since 2012, NASA has annually
held the International Space Apps Challenge - a mass collaboration
focused on space exploration that takes place over a weekend at
locations all across the globe. Its the largest hackathon in the
world, and its a completely locally organized, grassroots,
volunteer event; NASA puts forth the challenges and provides
guidance, but all the funding, logistics, and solution making is
done by unpaid volunteers. Anyone from the general public is
invited to attend, and NASA requires that no admission be charged
for attending. Ive had the privilege of organizing all four events
in New York City with the help of local non-profits and Im proud to
say we have established an 1100 member space hacker community, with
around 300 members active in a Meetup.com group. NASA chose New
York to be the global mainstage for Space Apps in 2014 and in 2015,
and this year was our most successful event yet with nearly 400
people attending. In addition to our annual hackathon, we also
hosted NASAs first Women in Data bootcamp, aimed at increasing
diversity and participation in hackathons, and our inaugural space
conference of renowned speakers - all of which you can find on
YouTube at the Space Videos link at the bottom. This year we were
invited to hold our event at Microsofts headquarters in Times
Square, where they gave us two floors of the building all weekend
long for the hackathon and conference. We had people lining up as
early as 5:00 a.m. to take part, and our space hackers produced
close to 30 projects with one of our teams producing a global prize
winning solution. So Ill just show you a few of NASAs mission
briefing statistics for Space Apps. You can see this years
participation was just overwhelming, truly worldwide participation,
and a great deal of it right here in Europe. Here you can see the
explosion in growth over four events in a three year period. Almost
2500 projects have been created in three years, and tens of
thousands of people have taken part. And were not just talking
about techies participating. Only about one third of attendees
self-identified as software developers, and the rest were a broad
mix of diverse, interdisciplinary people. Space Apps is in many
ways a misnomer,
2. as its not just about apps and its not all about space -
many challenges have to do with solving problems right here on
Earth regarding issues around climate, agriculture, and clean
water. Solutions to challenges can involve robotics, data
visualization, hardware, design, and educational curriculums or
displays. This diverse mix of people is exactly what NASA is
looking for. They want to crowdsource new ideas, and they want them
to come from voices outside of their mainstream. And this is why
they initiated their Women In Data bootcamp, and followed it up
with their Datanauts program. Im also proud to say that Space Apps
NYC has been gender balanced and diverse from our very first event
- and we even were able to provide on site childcare for all of our
participants this year. All solutions built at the event must be
submitted under an Open Source Initiative license that permits the
free and open dissemination of the work. Just like everything else
NASA produces, all the projects created at Space Apps must be
placed into the public domain for anyone in the world to use. You
can access any of NASAs resources at the four sites here and use
their work for any purpose, even commercial ones. So you might be
thinking to yourself, okay, a space hackathon is pretty cool, but
do you really get to work with NASA? Im here to tell you that the
answer is yes, you absolutely can work with NASA. Teams from all
over the world over the last three years have been approached by
NASA after Space Apps, and have even been offered the potential of
contracting to continue their work on their projects. Ill offer the
recent ISEE-3 reboot project as further proof to show that NASA is
happy to work with outside parties. If you didnt hear about this
last year, a small team of space hackers, led by Dennis Wingo,
raced between ground stations all over the world in an attempt to
salvage an abandoned NASA spacecraft from 1976 that observed the
solar winds and was redirected to fly through the tail of a comet.
Dennis Wingo is probably the ultimate space hacker - he specializes
in resurrecting decades old technology, and he does it with small
teams of so- called amateurs. His team reconstructed a radio using
GNU radio software to reestablish contact with the ISEE-3, was able
to execute several maneuvers with it, but ultimately discovered it
had lost its fuel and the team could not bring it back to a stable
orbit. But as long as his team was able to continue meeting the
gating requirements that NASA established for their mission, NASA
continued working with them. NASA wants to work with the public and
to further commercial space initiatives! NASA will even launch
satellites for you - and if you meet the requirements of the
CubeSat Launch Initiative, they will launch it FOR FREE as an
auxiliary payload on one of their regular missions. The CubeSat
design is a modular system, 10 centimeters on a side, that can
literally contain any kind of equipment, up to a designated
weight.
3. A variety of types of CubeSat have been successfully
launched, using equipment like Arduinos and smartphones for
computing power, and all manner of sensors and systems. You may
have heard of Bill Nye the science guy, and his recent Lightsail
Kickstarter project, which is testing the use of solar power for
propulsion of CubeSats - this slide is out of date, since his
Lightsail raised something like a million and a half dollars in
crowdfunding. But its not just NASA whos looking to collaborate
with the public in the exploration of space. Last year, Space Apps
NYC was approached by the American Museum of Natural History to
help them organize their first ever overnight hackathon - Hack The
Universe under the Hayden Planetarium. The museum wanted to
innovate and make its data available for participants to make open
source visualizations and tools that would ultimately become
exhibits or research aids. I have to say there is probably nothing
cooler than space hacking next to an actual meteorite. This was
only the second time in history that the museum allowed adults to
stay overnight. And of course, if you need to hack throughout the
night, theres only one beverage of choice to drink, and I made sure
it was there! About 30 projects were produced in just over 24 hours
using the museums known universe API, which you can access for
yourself at the link below. Another project that the American
Museum of Natural History has been working on, in collaboration
with Link show ping University in Sweden, is an open source suite
of space simulation tools collectively called OpenSpace. The museum
wants to grow an open source development public community around
these tools, which can be used on any platform to render actual
simulations of outer space, as recently occurred during the New
Horizons flyby of Pluto. Who wants to make a space game on a VR
headset?? This video is a demonstration of OpenSpace showing the
New Horizons / Jupiter gravity boost, combining NASA telemetry with
actual images of Jupiter to show how the mission performed taking
images of the red spot. You can learn more about OpenSpace and take
part in its development by signing up for the AMNH mailing list at
the link here, or directly on Link show ping's web site below
Lastly, Id like to mention that true to the mission of NASAs
incubator innovation goal, Im in the process of creating a space
technology accelerator program in New York City, and Im calling it
Empire Space Labs. Im
4. currently working with a stealth hardware startup, and a
company called SpaceVR. SpaceVR is launching a 3D, 360 degree
virtual reality camera to the International Space Station, and is
currently running a crowdfunding campaign to pay for the launch
costs - the successful launch of Overview One into space will be a
turning point in the new era of virtual exploration of space,
allowing anyone with a smartphone, tablet, computer, or VR headset
to experience what its like to be an astronaut. SpaceVR will work
with Nanoracks for launch services, Made In Space to 3D print the
housing of the camera on station, and an ISS astronaut to assemble
the camera and film content with it. And if anyone here in the camp
has a VR headset, Id be happy to hook you up with some really cool
unreleased footage taken by SpaceVR cameras. So Id like to invite
everyone to come hang out at the SpaceVillage! You can come buy a
model rocket, check out some awesome do it yourself space hacker
projects, and chat with us about the future of space exploration.
Well be having a chill party on Saturday night, with free food and
drinks sponsored by SpaceVR! Thanks for coming out!
