Cool competitions | General | Forum

I came across two new cool space-themed competitions at Spacehack today.

First is the "Hackerspaces in Space" competition, which is inspired by the "sending a camera to the edge of space on a weather balloon" projects which you have probably seen around the web lately (several have made Reddit): "Hackerspaces from around the world are already signing up to send weather balloons, with payloads, into near space hoping to capture pictures of the Earth’s horizon. Inspired by many recent amateur weather balloon endeavors across the country, Hackerspaces in Space aims to turn this phenomenon into a full- fledged competition. Launches will begin in June and run till the end of August. At the end of competition teams will post their results and pictures on the web where they will be judged on a variety of criteria like: retrieval time, weight of payload, and total cost of the project."

Second is NASA's Lunabotics Mining Competition, which we couldn't compete in even if we had the man-power since it is for US university teams only.  "The purpose of the Lunabotics Mining Competition is to engage and retain students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM, in a competitive environment that may result in innovative ideas and solutions, which could be applied to actual lunar excavation for NASA"…"The challenge will be conducted in a head-to-head format, in which the teams will be required to perform a competition attempt using the regolith simulant, sandbox and collector provided by NASA. NASA will fill the sandbox with regolith simulant, compact it and place rocks in it. Each competition attempt will occur sequentially. Between each competition attempt, the rocks will be removed, the regolith will be returned to a compacted state and the rocks will be returned to the sandbox. Consideration of prize awards will be based on each team's performance during the official competition attempt. All excavated mass deposited in the collector during the competition attempt will be weighed after completion of the competition attempt. The teams that excavate the first, second and third most lunar regolith simulant mass over the minimum excavation requirement within the time limit will respectively win first, second and third place prizes. Official rules are to be determined. Students, check back at a later date."

I know we don't have the manpower to take on either of these competitions (or to start our own projects like them), but when we do, I think we would do well to consider projects like these, especially the Lunabotics Mining competition.  Discussions about open source space endeavours in the Open Manufacturing Network google group have recently focused on the idea that, since getting actually hardware into space is expensive and tricky and is likely going to remain so for a while, the best way for small, open source projects to make headway is to focus on developing technology which will be useful in space but which can be built, tested and perfected on Earth.  Robots designed for in-situ resource utilisation are perhaps the best example of that there is, and the Lunabotics Mining competition illustrates what can be done in that direction on Earth, cheaply, without having to deal with rocketry at all.  While I by no means want to abandon our rocketry ambitions, I have to admit that this perspective makes a lot of sense.  Having a few projects along these lines could be a great way for us to do meaningful stuff without breaking our (financial or manpower) budget.

Rocket-To-The-Moon said: keeping our eyes open for new projects is a smart thing to do.

In this spirit, should we have an area on the forums for this?  I posted this in General out of lack of a better place to put it.  Even if we can't actually commit ourselves to extra projects just yet, there is no harm in discussing ideas and coming up with rough proposals, and the forums should (I think) have a place to facilitate this.

I just tried to create some extra subforums to deal with these problems, but the Word Press Dashboard is telling me that I don't have sufficient permissions to edit the forums, which is weird because I've done so extensively before.  The forum software itself still lists me as a Moderator so I have no idea what is going on.  Any ideas, Rizwan?

I tried again after deleting all cookies from cstart.org and fully clearing my cache. I get the same result.  Any other ideas?

Rizwan said:That is certainly very weird. I will take a look this weekend. In the mean time can you let me know what forums you want created?

Sorry for delayed response.

I was planning on creating two new forums.  One was a "Project Proposals" forum in the CSTART group, and one was a "Misc/Other" forum which was supposed to be a completely global catch-all for everything else.  I'm not sure which group it should live in, I suppose perhaps in Community group?