NASA Technology: Its Hard To Reach For The Stars When Your Head Is In The Sand
NASA, Harvard & TopCoder Partner to Develop a Secure Solar System Internet Protocol
“TopCoder, the world’s largest professional development and design community, with NASA and the Harvard-NASA Tournament Lab (at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science), today announced the launch of a series of innovation challenges that will develop foundational technological concepts for disruption tolerant deep space networking. NASA has made significant progress in developing Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocols that aide in deep space communication. DTN protocols are an approach to network architecture that seeks to address the potential for lack of continuous connectivity in deep space. It is meant to aid NASA in the exploration of the solar system by overcoming communication time delays caused by interplanetary distances, and the disruptions caused by planetary rotation, orbits and limited transmission power.”
Keith’s note: This sounds pretty cool builds upon the Interplanetary Internet work that NASA has engaged in over the past decade or so. You’d think that extending the Internet (so to speak) to allow interaction between other worlds and spacecraft traversing our solar system would be something that all of NASA’s IT and Technology, and Innovation people would want to crow about – especially since this effort is geared to engage the public via crowd sourcing. In this wired world, this is something that almost everyone in the public can relate to. Indeed, utilized crowd sourced efforts and making the results widely known is something that the Open Government Initiative is supposed to be promoting.
This effort is being coordinated by the NASA Tournament Lab at TopCoder. No specific sponsoring office or organization at NASA is mentioned. TopCoder put out a press release last week. Alas, despite the obvious nexus of interest you’d expect, NASA has been totally silent:
– NASA Public Affairs (no press release issued)
– NASA Chief Information Officer (no mention)
– NASA Space Technology Directorate (no mention)
– NASA – Office of the Chief Technologist (no mention)
– NASA Space Communications and Navigation (no mention – they also make no mention of LADEE’s recent laser comms test)
NASA Open Government Initiative (no mention)
Curiously, NASA PAO did promote NASA’s Interplanetary Internet efforts last year when someone commanded Robonaut to do something on the ISS. A week prior to this recently announced Interplanetary Internet challenge NASA posted this:
NASA Engages the Public to Discover New Uses for Out-of-this-World Technologies
“Now NASA has joined forces with the product development startup Marblar (www.marblar.com) for a pilot program allowing the public to crowd source product ideas for forty of NASA’s patents. This initiative will allow Marblar’s online community to use a portion of NASA’s diverse portfolio of patented technologies as the basis of new product ideas.”
Again, for the most part, NASA’s Technology and Information organizations have been mostly mute:
– NASA Public Affairs (no press release issued – just an online feature)
– NASA Chief Information Officer (no mention)
– NASA Space Technology Directorate (no mention)
– NASA – Office of the Chief Technologist (posted a link)
– NASA Open Government Initiative (no mention)
Add in the curious case of innovate.nasa.gov which is apparently now “under construction, but we will be re-launching soon” after being online for a year and doing absolutely nothing to warrant its existence (or expense), and you really have to wonder what NASA is planning to do with all this Technology money that is heading their way. If the agency cannot internally coordinate a simple mechanism to organize this technology stuff – and then share it with the public – then maybe that technology money belongs elsewhere.
