|
“I don’t remember Apollo at all,” confesses Robert Braun, NASA’s chief technologist. “I feel really bad about it.” Nevertheless, he has spent a lot of time reading and thinking about the mission to the moon, and its significance not just for space exploration, but for the nation’s innovative edge and economy. Braun wonders, “What is my generation’s space race?.” Braun offers not one but a handful of “game-changing civil space possibilities” that he feels certain could be accomplished in his lifetime. These include an asteroid defense system, forecasting major storms in time to move entire populations out of harm’s way; and finding life in space. Braun notes that many others embrace these “lofty goals,” but that NASA has been hampered in approaching them by a lack of investment in technology. When Braun first graduated from Penn State decades ago, he worked on “human to Mars” programs. There were huge technological obstacles then that persist today. Says Braun, “We need a series of technological advances crossing multiple disciplines to make a human Mars mission feasible.” The recently minted NASA Space Technology Program (STP), under Braun’s wing, intends to seed R&D ventures — whether in early stage innovation, experimentation or pilot demonstrations -- that may ultimately solve the kinds of problems hampering human space exploration. The program will also yield numerous other benefits, Braun predicts, in many other areas of science and engineering. These investments in disruptive technologies will pay off in turn by creating spinoff high tech industries, spurring new jobs, economic growth and global competitiveness.  Initial STP R&D money is headed for the International Space Station, which offers unique opportunities to explore long-term human degradation in space, water reclamation, and human-robot collaborations. Other projects include different kinds of space telescopes that could be assembled in space. STP hopes to nurture many ideas, select...
|
Video Length: 0
Date Found: May 24, 2011
Date Produced: May 20, 2011
|
|
MIT World |
July 07, 2011
In three presentations that look back to digital-age milestones, and glimpse ahead to what may come next, speakers share some previously undisclosed stories, great enthusiasms, and a few concerns. Nicholas Negroponte tells a few “dirty secrets” about the start of the MIT Media Lab, including ...
|
MIT World |
June 29, 2011
Winners of the A.M.Turing Award, the Nobel Prize of computing, describe their singular contributions to the field, and their works’ impact. They also find time to discuss the current and future state of computer science. Moderator Stephen Ward starts with 1990 prize winner Fernando Corbato, who ...
|
MIT World |
June 13, 2011
Drew Davidson likes to play with blocks in his sandbox, as he demonstrates in a show-and-tell to interactive media colleagues. In this case, the playground is an online game called Minecraft, a two-year-young internet sensation with millions of followers, developed single-handedly by a ...
|
MIT World |
June 06, 2011
Amy Bruckman finds the accomplishments of such online collaborations as Wikipedia, Apache and Firefox “nothing less than astounding,” and is both eagerly seeking and hoping to foster the next creative group Internet sensation. In her lab’s empirical studies, Bruckman has dissected different ...
|
MIT World |
June 06, 2011
The ultimate questions for this Sandbox 2011 panel, posed by moderator Alan Gershenfeld, are “Where is technology not working? When is technology not the answer?” That’s a bold agenda for a panel of children’s media creators and a roomful of other producers in the industry, from Sesame ...
|
|
|
|
|
|
Featured Content
Featuring websites that enhance the internet user’s experience.
|