NASA Johnson Space Center’s (JSC) social innovation concept encourages out-of-the-box problem solving within the NASA community to benefit both NASA’s core mission and humanity’s most pressing needs. Because human space exploration technologies share similar requirements with developing world technologies, the program goal is to provide non-traditional collaboration and diverse resources to encourage multi-disciplinary solutions. For instance, the technology goals of keeping people alive in a difficult environment involve addressing requirements for low maintenance and robustness, and often include using renewable energy sources. Problem solving for such challenges has crossover benefits, which is why innovation in one engineering field may be applicable to another. Therefore, the JSC social innovation concept is an alternative method of developing expertise within the NASA community, which can simultaneously demonstrate relevance as it contributes to improving life on Earth. By recognizing that innovation can come from unexplored and unexpected places, this concept aims to create an environment where NASA engineers can collaborate with non-traditional partners to address the critical needs of NASA and its many stakeholders.
The 1969 Apollo Moon landing captured the imagination of the world as it collectively saw what humans are capable of – according to Astronaut Neil Armstrong, “That’s one small step for Man, one giant leap for Mankind.” As a result, NASA has solved in the past and can solve in the future the toughest challenges of human exploration. However, today at the start of 2012, NASA is at a crossroads. As commercial and international access to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) becomes more commonplace, America’s space agency is looking toward the huge technological challenges of taking humans to remote, harsh and resource-constrained environments for long time periods.
Human space exploration has been primarily limited to LEO for the past 50 years. With the exception of the 1960s’ and 1970s’ Apollo missions, humans have explored space within a few hundred miles of the Earth’s surface. LEO is where the space shuttle flew and where the International Space Station (ISS) currently is. Even in the Apollo moon missions, while physically distant, U.S. astronauts were on missions measured in days.
Flying in, to and from space is an incredibly challenging task. It takes enormous amounts of energy to move a payload from the Earth’s surface to velocities and altitudes sufficient enough to reach LEO. Once in the vacuum of space, sustaining human life is not easy; it is a harsh environment in just about every respect. Life support equipment (air, water, food, waste, medical, etc.) is essential. Today these systems work well enough, but they are complex and expensive. And, they require consumables, resupply and maintenance. Returning humans to Earth is also difficult because the spacecraft must protect the occupants from extreme temperatures as they decelerate from orbital speeds of 18,000 mph...
