We just completed the 6th annual NASA Robotics Mining Competition, and like always it was awesome! This year, 46 universities from around the United States brought robots to mine the simulated Martian soil and win the coveted Joe Kosmo Award. Every year it has been an amazing success. We…
Category: Citizen Space
Time for a Sand Safari
I collect sand as a hobby and for science. One of the things I love doing is going on a sand safari, a trip especially to collect sand. These trips helped my development as a scientist and they are fun. I haven’t been on a sand safari in a long…
Can Space Hackers Colonize the Solar System?
I am sitting in a room at at the Kennedy Space Center for the International Space Apps Challenge. It is late at night, I’m very tired, and there are eight other people in the room: all much younger than me, all college students, all writing software for a game called…
Calling Citizen Space Explorers
Do you want to be a space explorer? Many internet billionaires are turning into commercial space explorers: flying as space tourists, building and launching their own rockets, and starting space mining companies. They do this because the technology to take human civilization into the solar system has arrived. Space colonization…