NASA to host global hackathon aimed at fixing life on Earth and in space

NASA and IBM’s Bluemix cloud services are sponsoring a worldwide hackathon, The Space App Challenge. The hackathon aims to challenge participants to produce relevant open source solutions for both life on Earth and in space.

Despite being called The Space App Challenge, NASA insists the competition is not only about apps but also about challenges that involve robotics, data visualisation, hardware, design, and many other elements.

The event will take place on 11 and 12 April 2015 and will be preceded by a bootcamp event on 10 April 2015 to be live-streamed globally. The themes for the challenge include: Earth, outer space, humans and robotics.

On the 11th and 12th, the event will take place simultaneously in 162 countries involving 136 cities and 10 000 participants. Teams of technologists, scientists, designers, artists, educators, entrepreneurs, developers and students across the globe will collaborate and engage and use openly available data, supplied through NASA missions and technology, to design innovative solutions for global challenges.

NASA stresses that anyone is welcomed to join a team for the challenge, stating that:

“Teams need project managers, designers, artists, educators, writers – anyone who can help advance the cause. In fact, most teams will benefit from having non-programmers working with them.”
“We believe that innovative practices are the key to creating and discovering state-of-the-art technology. The International Space Apps Challenge sought to bridge the gap between innovative technology and its practice.” NASA said in a statement.

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Registration for the project closed some time ago, but NASA has yet to release any detailed information around the participants.

Local judging on the challenges will occur at each location under the direction of the local hosts.

To guide local judges, NASA has provided some judging guidelines, though it encourages locations to come up with their own. These judging guidelines are Impact, Creativity, Product, Sustainability and Presentation.

Each local event can nominate up to two projects to advance to global judging.

In the global judging round, in which two projects from each city will advance to, NASA judges will select winners in each of the five finalist categories: Best mission Concept, best use of hardware, best use of data, most inspiring, and galactic impact.

The judging process will then conclude with judges reviewing will review the finalists based on a one minute long video, and project page links.

Global winners will be eligible to attend a NASA launch event. Winners and one guest will be required to pay their own expenses. NASA will supply transportation to and from the launch site.

Image:NASA