Space a Whole Lot Closer for a Hundred-plus People

Citizen Astronaut and Space Hacker Workshop a Sold-out Success

by alvin remmers

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — This weekend’s Citizen Astronaut and Space Hacker Workshop at the Hacker Dojo across the freeway from NASA’s Ames Research Center was attended by more than 100 space experimenters and aspiring space experimenters. The sold-out event focused on citizen science, access to space by everyone.

Until recently, experimentation in space was limited to science chosen by NASA and other government programs and access was further limited by the high cost of space access. The answer to the high cost of space access lies in the new vehicles being developed by the likes of Virgin Galactic and XCOR Aerospace according to attendees at the Workshop. Suborbital reusable vehicles will enable daily microgravity access to researchers for hundreds, thousands, then tens of thousands experiments.

A star at the gathering was XCOR Aerospace, developers of the Lynx spaceplane. The Lynx will fly to space up to four times daily, taking passengers and experiments above 100,000 kilometers for a few minutes of microgravity exposure.

Sean Casey, whose Silicon Valley Space Center hosted the event, described the first session of the day: “Ed Wright talked about his Citizen Science program which is really a Citizen Astronaut program, where people can build payloads and fly. The selection of Citizen Astronauts for Ed Wright’s flights, of which he has ten from XCOR… the selection will be made from those people who are going to build payloads. Rather than just having application process, [Ed Wright] says ‘its more effective if I have somebody who really understands what’s going on… that is really engaged, and engaged in a hands-on – ‘I’m building hardware’ – sense’. Ed Wright was followed by Khaki Rodway of XCOR Aerospace talking about the XCOR program and what lies in store in the short term, this year, and in the years ahead.” Those two presentations, according to Casey, formed the core of the workshop.

“I grew up getting excited by astronauts, and I thought, ‘how could I do this myself?’ ” said Manu Sharma, co-founder of Infinity Aerospace and one of the organizers of this Workshop, adding that “the goal of the workshop is to spread the message that you can create your own space programs.”

Carl Carruthers, a structural biologist who came from Houston to speak at the event, echoed that message. He conducted experiments on space shuttle missions STS-134 and 135, currently has an experiment on the ISS, and talked to the assembly about space research. Speaking with Moonandback, he said that “It’s becoming easier and easier to do high quality research”. He continued, “I’m just Incredibly excited about the future of microgravity research in space. It’s an amazing time to be alive and everybody can be a citizen scientist nowadays. It levels the playing field of research.”

The workshop continued with a series of researchers talking on subjects such as synthetic biology, mining the moon, autonomous robots, radiation, protein crystals and 3-D printing.

Both afternoons broke into hands-on sessions of Arduino sensors and programming, sample payloads, Ardulab software and construction, and payload infrastructure and the days ended up with ‘unconference’ sessions.

Ed Wright said, “I think this will be the prototype for a wonderful series of Space Hacker Workshops going forward. Asked to elaborate, he said, “The next one will probably be in Dallas in July. We will follow up with other workshops in Houston, Austin, Florida, probably Huntsville, Alabama. We’ve also had interest from Phoenix and Portland, Oregon. We’d like to do three or four additional workshops this year, then more next year.

 

 

 

Moonandback

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Source: http://moonandback.com/2013/05/06/space-a-whole-lot-closer-for-a-hundred-plus-people/