 Hello, and welcome to Tomorrow Space, Orbit 12.29. So good to have you here today, and I'm going to be your host for the show, Jared. You probably know me a little bit better from tomorrow news, but hey, I'm here, and we're going to be having a very interesting interview today with Ali Llewell, the co-founder of the NASA Space Apps Challenge, which is something that you may not have heard of, but something that you actually can participate in, right, Ali? Absolutely. Now, with NASA Space Apps Challenge, what is it? Yes, so the Space Apps Challenge is what we love to call a mass collaboration. So it's a version of what most people would call a hackathon, and a hackathon is a big event where people come together and develop technology collaboratively. But what we love about Space Apps is it's not just one hackathon. It's a bunch of hackathons in cities all over the world, but where those cities aren't working independently of each other, they're working together. They're sharing their resources and gifts and talents and ideas so that the product is far more than what one hackathon could produce on its own, but begins to tap into that collective experience and genius and insight that's available around the world. So Space Apps is an event that is that kind of mass collaboration devoted to inviting people to improve life in space and life on Earth because of what we're doing in space. So what was the catalyst for the challenge? Because this challenge actually goes quite far back. All the way back, I mean, very far to when apps were in their, I don't want to say apps were in their infancy, but they were still a relatively new thing. What was that mean? Early stage, absolutely. So I'm actually going to take you a little further back than that to talk about how Space Apps was born. So there's a collaboration that was born several years before Space Apps started in 2012. And a few years before that, we as NASA were part of something called random hacks of kindness. You get that random hacks of kindness. I love it. And so it was a partnership between Google, HP, Yahoo, Microsoft, NASA and the World Bank. And what I loved about it is we were all in a conference together, people from all of our organizations talking about disaster relief and data and analytics and basically saying, what would happen if we brought our developer networks and our data and our partners and our vision together and decided we actually wanted to do something about disaster relief and the people that were in need and the way that we could leverage that to really make a difference in the world. And like conferences normally go, we were all sitting on the stage talking and doing our thing. And at the end of it, we all looked at each other. And I actually, I wasn't there personally, but someone said, hey, what would happen if we actually did something about this? What would happen if we didn't just go to a conference and talk about it, but we did something? And from that, they started a hackathon called Random Hacks of Kindness. And so together, those organizations recognized that when we worked together and we each brought our little piece to play, we made a huge difference. We worked on some incredible app projects. Everything from one of the earliest successes was called I'm OK. And it was what now became the Facebook check-in after a disaster started as a Google project where instead of going to a hospital and asking if your loved one was there, you could just log in online and tell who was OK and who was expressing their status after the disaster. We continued to build this partnership. We recognized we learned a lot about how to write great problem statements, how to identify what problems mattered, how to leverage developer networks and get people in the right position, and how to do this globally. And so Random Hacks was great. We did three or four rounds of it. It happened twice a year. We were all very involved as core partners. But at that time, myself and a few of my colleagues, we began something at NASA called the Open Government Initiative. And it was an early executive order that Barack Obama assigned an office. And he talked about how government data needed to be open and it needed to be shared with the world and it needed to be used to improve things. There was a lot of impulse about this in the government at that time. And so that was on one hand, was that desire to see NASA leverage open government to the best best way the world needed it. But over here was also the idea of our experience at Random Hacks of kindness. And NASA was like, well, that's great. But is it really about space exploration? Is this really relevant to our core mission, which is exploring the universe? We like that we're doing this, but we'd like to do something a little more directly space. And so with those two polls pulling on us, we were actually at another conference in San Francisco. We drew it on a napkin and we said, what if we took the Random Hacks of kindness model and we made it all about space and we did it all over the world at the same time? Because what we had discovered about NASA was everybody gets excited about the meatball. Everybody gets excited about the vision for exploration. Almost everybody at some point in their childhood has a dream to be an astronaut or be an explorer or go new places. So could we pull all those pieces together? And that's why we started Space Hacks. So that first year in 2012, our management said, oh, just have a couple of locations. We'd be really excited if it was a thousand people. So we began to leverage our networks that we had built through Random Hacks. And that was really easy for us to spin up because we had learned how to do it. And on the other side, we started to think about, well, what would we invite people to do? And we started to talk around NASA with people about what are the right challenges? What are the things that NASA would love to work on, but maybe it doesn't have time or doesn't have funding or doesn't have the right expertise? Because the longer you've been around NASA, you start to realize that people all see all problems the same way. A lot of times, people who come into the agency are trained in similar paths, similar schools, similar engineering programs, and they view problems the same way. But people who had come from a radically different background could see problems really differently. And could we pull that into Space Hacks? And so that's kind of where the genesis came from. In that first year, we had 25 locations and saw some really incredible things. And what were some of those things that came in in that first year? Because, I mean, that was foundational for what has continued. It really was. So one of my very favorite projects that first year is we were talking with Leland Melvin, and he's an astronaut, and he at the time was running the Education Office at NASA. And so we went in and talked to Leland because we were concerned that Space Hacks would turn into kind of a token outreach thing. You know, here have a NASA sticker, watch a video, like feel like you were part of something. We didn't want it to be that way. We wanted to go, what are the significant things that connect people's heart and experience? So we sat and talked with Leland for a long time, and he said, you know, when I was on the Space Station, the one thing I dreamed about was Fresh Bread. We're like, OK, well, there's 100 reasons why you can't have Fresh Bread in space. You can't have fire, you can't have ovens, we can't bake things. He's like, I'm just telling you what I wanted in space. So we created a challenge for that first hackathon, and we called it Bread in Space. And so we gave the constraints, hey, here are the things we can't have on the station, here are all the reasons, devise a way to have Fresh Bread. And I loved it because a lot of the food people we would talk to, the Food Lab is located at the center where I work at the Johnson Space Center. So we knew a lot of those guys and we're trying to talk to them and find out what their constraints were and if they had had any ideas and they're like, it's just, it's not possible. And so we just moved forward and we put the challenge out there anyway. And so at the hackathon in England at Exeter, outside of London, they had a 16-year-old boy named Sam. And Sam was a genius. He was a high school kid. He worked on a bunch of technical projects. And at the end, he said, I have a little more time. Let me figure it. Let me think about this bread thing. So he took the bread project off in the corner and he came back and he said, I have an idea. And so he took a chemistry process that he had learned in his high school advanced chemistry class. And he said, hey, you don't need fire. Here's a chemical process that will actually produce Fresh Bread in Space. Here's how to do it and wrote it all out. And what I loved is he submitted that and he got second place at the hackathon that first year. And the judges said after the event, they said, we gave him second place. Not because we didn't think it was awesome, but we just didn't know if it would work. And so we weren't sure we should give him first place. And so from that, we have not yet gone to test, excuse me, we have not yet gone to test that in space yet. And actually, there's some other ways we're working on it. But he produced such a novel idea that took such a unique approach. And we actually brought him into our team to serve as an intern. But that's what we wanted to see in space apps was ideas like that where people took totally radical approaches, brought them in. And even if we weren't in the end going to use that particular approach, those ideas generated so many more ideas and so much more excitement and helped people realize why space was so important. And why it could help, why their participation in space was so important. Yeah, it seems like that little spark is that one thing that can just lead down a path to change a large number of things and branch off into that area as well with it. Exactly, exactly. So if someone were to want to get involved in the space apps challenge, what is that take and what should they be prepared to do for that? So here's the thing and I'm going to just give a personal context to this. I am not a coder. My degrees are in Greek and Divinity. And I work at NASA and people are like, what are you doing at a hackathon? Who are you? Like, what are you talking about? We need people who are all different. And it took me a couple of years at NASA to recognize that, you know, we all come in and we feel like we're an imposter. Like, why am I here? I'm the one who doesn't deserve to be here. What do I know? And then I realized because my training was so different, all of a sudden I could see things in a way that really brought something unique to my team. So everybody is needed at space apps. I don't code, but I can bring coders together, ask a lot of questions and help them see their problem differently. I can manage projects. I can name things. I can create designs for things. Like, there's a role for everyone. So for someone who's interested in participating, I would say, come get involved. Come to a space apps near you. So it's coming up soon. This October, there's events all over the world and we can use people of every experience, every background. One of my favorite space apps events, there was an eight year old boy who just wanted to participate and they made him the name of the project. So he went around every project, asked them what they were doing and created a clever name for what they were going to call it. We had one hackathon where we had a bunch of pilots who came in aeronautics is obviously a core vision of NASA. We had some aeronautics challenges and a bunch of airline pilots came for the weekend and shared their perspective on air traffic control. And some of the aeronautics issues that we were so. So if you want to get involved, we need you to come with the experiences and the skills and the backgrounds that you have. Because our vision is really that everybody would be a part of space exploration. And that means you, whether you're a mother or a teacher or an engineer or a doctor or pilot or whatever, everything in between your perspective on those problems changes what you do. So you just can sign up, show up at a space apps event near you. They'll get you involved on a team. You'll figure out which project sounds interesting to you. There's always a ton of projects of a wide variety, a wide different number of backgrounds. And so as those projects come together, they'll find a place where you can speak into it, help improve it, help make it better and be a vital part of that. And for those projects, is there a theme that happens every year or is it open ended on what you can work on? So I don't actually know if there's a theme this year. There normally is. I don't actually it's oceans, the moon, planets, stars and living in the world. There's five core themes this year. Every year it changes a little bit. And what's exciting about the themes is the themes kind of give some boundaries because there's so much work to be done and give some buckets kind of for us to focus on. But those themes help us remember that space touches everything space influences everything. So from the planets to the life here on earth to what we see in the sky and everything in between. That's what the themes help us to pay attention to. So if I show up at the hackathon, what should I expect? Like, what should I bring myself and what should I be prepared to do on there? Yeah, so if you have a computer, it's great to bring a computer. It's not required. If you don't have one, you can still come and participate. But normally you'd show up on a Friday night and there's some introductions. They'll go through the challenges and they'll say at our event, we're going to focus on these challenges. Usually if you're like, but I really love 3D printing. Or I really love heliophysics, like whatever it is, they'll often find a way to accommodate that. But you'll show up and they'll talk about the projects that they want to do and then they'll build teams. And that's always a fun time because we'll go, hey, we over here really need a project manager. Hey, we really over here need a backend developer. Hey, we need a data analyst. We need a designer. So all of a sudden you'll start to see where your skills and giftings fit and they may create a new team around you. You may say, I'm an artist. How can I do it? And maybe you draw things for every project. Maybe you draw diagrams or draw designs. Maybe you take photos. We had one hackathon space apps collaboration where people filmed a video of the whole thing to talk about how the process worked and how people connected together and any of those things. So you just come with your skills and they'll find a place that you fit in that picture. And once you do that, once you find that place, your team will start to work together. You'll sit down and go, what's the challenge? How does it matter? What do we want to do about it? But the first question you always ask in space apps is, why does this challenge matter? Why do we care about it? And then based on why we care about it, you'll start to go, what do we want to build? What do we want to develop? And then there's an extended time on that Friday and that Saturday where you'll just build stuff. One of the things I love about space apps is there's hardware, there's software, there's creative projects. We have people who sew things for space apps, who develop films. Like every spectrum of technology and art is part of what happens. And so you'll have a lot of time to work with your team and go, we want to make a website or we want to make a piece of music. We had one hackathon where everybody wrote music and it was amazing. Because the vision in the end is that everybody impact what we're doing in exploration and that it be a part of all of our cultures together. And as that happens, it generates this energy and this future about it. We've had a number of companies that were born out of space apps. That was a team that built a product that was so successful. They said, we want to take this to market. And as they took it to market, they said, we want to continue to build on this. It's exciting to see we've had teams also that last half a weekend and then they evolve and go on to other things. And that's okay too. What we want to space apps to do is create space for you and for me and for all of us to find a place to contribute. What we know, what we see, what we're passionate about to that cause of life and space and life on earth. And then I just realized I forgot at the end is the judging and this is the exciting part. At the very end, right? You demonstrate what you built and people, the judges will give awards and from that there's winners. But the winners are in the sense of you made a unique contribution. The winners aren't in the sense of, hey, I beat you. The winners are in the sense of let's recognize the unique work that's happened. Yeah, and it sounds like these are sort of like a crash course weekend incubators for ideas. And that's something that you don't really get to be involved in a lot. It's just someone regularly out there, especially say like in the corporate world or something. So yeah, pretty, pretty. Yeah, we want people not to feel like because I'm not experienced in that that I can't come. So there's a place for everyone. And it's fun. You want to be mentored and tutored in that come along or you're an expert in that. Maybe you incubate businesses professionally. Awesome. Come along like the power of space apps is there's a place for everyone and there's a place for everyone to make a contribution. And as we figure out how to make that happen, all of a sudden we realize the power of space to leverage and activate the community around the world for all of our benefit. And they kind of talk about a little bit all of our benefit. Andy Law in our chat room is asking sort of, you know, who does the space app stuff end up there? Who has the ownership of it? Is it the team? Is it NASA? Is it get sent out to public domain? Kind of how does it work post competition? Yeah, that's a great question. So there's a real value at space apps for things to be open source. It's part of why it was started in the kind of spirit of the open government initiative that stuff be contributed for the good of the world back to be open source. But that's not a requirement. We encourage that. But at the end of the day what we say about it is, hey, you have to do what's right for you. So if you want to create a private license, NASA does not own your material. You own your material. If you open source it awesome. We encourage you to. But like I said, we've had people who've built proprietary businesses off of their space apps projects and that happens as well. So Lisa Stojanowski in our chat room wants to know what are some of your favorite challenges that have happened at space apps? Yes. So to come to mind, one of mine was a couple of years ago. I was in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which is an extremely experienced space apps location at this point. And the challenge was how can we deal with vitamin deficiencies in astronauts on orbits with the materials at hand? And what they developed for this challenge was a wearable based on it was like you could base it on an Apple watch or an Android so a wearable device that an astronaut would wear that would give you a live update that says Ali is deficient vitamin C today by 10 milligrams. And so in response to that, that data automatically went to a 3D printer, which 3D printed a gummy vitamin for me particularly with the amount of vitamin C I was deficient in. And so what was incredible was to see the use of 3D printing, which is growing on the space station presently. The use of wearable devices and the ability to personalize their content development for crew members. And what was really fun about that project too was you can imagine how many more places that that project will be useful. You can imagine people on submarines. You can imagine people in limited habitats. You know, you can imagine people in nursing homes, all kinds of applications. So something that benefited life in space was easy quick and inexpensive using materials on hand, but something that could also be manifested and used in another in another location. So it's projects like that that I find really generative. Another one that I really enjoyed one year is we had a Lego Mindstorms challenge. And we always want to try every year at space apps to find ways to get kids involved. It's not intended for children, but a lot of sites have, but children are welcome. So it's not, they're not the target focus. But if they have a way to participate and want to, we're always excited to have them. And so that year they were working on Mindstorms and they have these robotics challenges. If we had a team in Kathmandu, Nepal and the team in Kathmandu said, Hey, we have a problem. We don't have access to Mindstorms. You know, and what I loved about this taking a step back is we talk a lot in space apps world about the orbital perspective, right? And crew members on the space station look down from space and they see that the boundaries that define us on earth from space, you can't even see them. We're all living on one fragile planet together and we're all unified in that. And so as the this team in Kathmandu was talking about just not having access to the same things. We took that really to heart. We're like, How can we work with these guys? How can we in the spirit of space apps have them fully participate and not have them excluded, you know, because of their access to resources. And they built an incredible approach to robotics. It was called Carcana Rovers. They built an approach to that that used what they had on hand, didn't bother to use Lego Mindstorms, you know, which is a great thing, but use the batteries that they had because they're like, we have kids that don't don't use computers. So how do we teach them robotics, but the the fruit of that project, you know, it's great kids who may be in America and they have access to that stuff all the time and they had a fun weekend and they probably learned something, but how much more these kids who live in Kathmandu who this was their first exposure. This was the one time that they saw how technology could meet them where they were and and leverage their role in the world and the things that they saw and the things they could learn and grow in and the fact that they they built their own robotics approach to me was just so compelling and created space for people in that we had one project that was in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We were working at the Excite Center at Drexel University and they had a garment 3D printer. And so we're talking about 3D fabrics and how that worked and how they used it in their educational context and they printed skirts that would live track the space station in orbit around the skirts. Wow. And it was just so fun because a lot of people like dismissed that so well fashion who cares about that that's not serious technology and you know, so some people were like, but then some people started to realize fashion is a real part of our world and space can influence the fashion world as well. Right. We don't have these divides where we're like, here's serious technology and here's unserious things in the world. Like all those things are intertwined and that's part of the culture that we live in. It's part of the reality that we're in now and so seeing those things come together and seeing people who get really excited about clothes all of a sudden asking questions about, wait, is that real time? Is that really where the space station is? And how do you know that? Where does it go around? All of a sudden what we're doing, which was our vision all along is inviting those connections, inviting those conversations and everybody feeling inspired about space. I think that's fascinating, you know, having groups from all over the world be able to participate in this because when you look at aerospace, especially in the United States, it's usually just like clamp down really tightly under rules and regulations that nobody outside of the United States is going to be allowed to do this and work on this in this specific capacity. But with space apps that opens that up wildly as you've said with a robotics team in Kathmandu, like holy moly, that's not something I would have expected out of that. Well, there's two inspirations I think that we really had about that and one of them was my co-founder and I, one of our co-founders, he was from Edmore, North Dakota and I'm from Austin, Texas. And we had this conversation about how different it was that me coming from Austin where technology is very accepted, things are very accessible. All these things, that was a very normal world. But in Edmore, they didn't like it was less accessible, it felt further away from that aerospace context like you're talking about. And so we were talking about how do we equalize that where it's just as normal for a little boy growing up in Edmore and a little girl in Austin to grow up feeling like they can be part of NASA, they can be part of space exploration. And we wanted to make that available to all of them. The other thing that happened that inspired that really was astronaut Sunny Williams, who's just an amazing human being, talked about, she shared at a thing at work one day about, she always went back to India where she was from and she shared stories about space and shared stories about how she got to NASA and how that worked for her and how even there among some of the poorest of the poor children in the world, they got so excited about exploration. That was so compelling to them, where it was far more removed. So we really carried that with us about, we wanted people from all backgrounds, all experiences to see this and to feel like they could put their hands and fingers into it. I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid and I grew up and I was actually terrible at math and I get really motion sick, which is a problem for an astronaut. But I really said, I guess it's over for me. And what makes me excited is I don't want anybody to ever have that feeling of there's no way for me to be a part of this. And so Space Apps finds a place for everyone so that whether whatever you have, whatever you know, there's a place. Yeah. And that's like really in line with our goal here at tomorrow because we're here to get people, everyone excited about space and we very firmly believe that space really is for everybody and that everybody should come along on the trip that we take regardless of where we're going. And kind of talking a little bit about participation in the Space Apps challenge. Do you necessarily have to be at a place in person or can you virtually do that? We had a question about that in our chat room about being able to. Absolutely. So even on the website, you can sign up at the location for virtual participation. And that's the great thing about technology, isn't it? So why on earth in the day and age that we can talk live to anywhere in the world just like we are now? Would we not have a way to engage everybody in the world regardless of where they were located? So we were really excited on our very first year of Space Apps. We want, it was very important to us to have people on every continent and in space because we wanted to demonstrate exactly that. You could participate virtually. So we had a live downlink with the Space Station and we had two participants at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Nice. Because we wanted to demonstrate that, right? Because it's awesome. So thank you, Internet. We can get on Zoom. We can get on Skype. We can get on Slack. We can get on all these tools. And you might never see my face. I have a lot of people I've worked with super closely in Space Apps that it took me five or six years before I met them. But we had collaborated super closely on some incredibly unique things. And that's one of the things that's so compelling about it, right? Is in a virtual world in an information age, the Internet has changed the way we work. It's changed the way we do business. It's changed the way we solve problems. The smartest people in the world might not work for you. So you should find a way to get them involved. And Space Apps does exactly that. So wherever you are in the world, if you don't have a Space Apps near you, you can set up for the virtual location. And as you do that, you might build a team with other people who are virtual. You might have a team in a city far away from you in a different country who says, I really need a person who can do this. And you're like, that's me. I'll help. And you can just get up live on the Internet and participate with them. It's so inspiring when all of a sudden we realize that we can augment what NASA is doing. We can come together in a new and powerful way. And all of us are needed to make that happen. Now, Sarge Enzyme in our chat room is asking, what apps, if any, have made it out into the world? Yeah, so I don't know all of them. It's been several years and several apps. But I'll talk about one of my favorites. And this was one that was built in Space Apps, Kansas City. And what was exciting that way that year is this is a great project. The app was called Sol. And we're talking about that year about Mars. It was right when NASA was getting excited about Mars. And what they used in Sol was they recognized, OK, if our vision is to get people excited about space, where do people go every day? Well, they go on their phone, right? And when they go on their phone, what do they look at almost every day? Well, they look at the weather. OK, so what if we built the most beautiful, incredible, slick, well-designed weather app and it had the weather in their local city and the weather on Mars? And it was an incredible app that they did. It was beautiful, slick, well done. And so they put it up and it went live in the App Store, went immediately to number one that year, did an incredible job. Every day we were all going around going, oh, do you know that it's 117 degrees on Mars today? It was amazing because their vision wasn't just building up for Mars weather. Their vision was where do we put that that people will see it and it will change the consciousness about exploration. And so they did that. It was live on the App Store for a super long time until NASA, we take their responsibility. We took down the API that had the data that fueled the app. And so then they had to take the app down because we all of a sudden weren't transmitting, we as NASA weren't transmitting that data anymore. So I know there have been several more but that was one of them that was super fun and got a lot of people excited because of the visibility. But I just love the ingenuity of you can go certain places where space nerdy people like me and maybe like so many of you, we're always going to go. But where's the places that not traditional space people will go? And let's go there because that's where we want to take that consciousness. Yeah, and I kind of, we have some videos of some of the space apps makers that were in the competition last year and there's one of them that's a VR sort of simulator that shows you the different gravity on different planets by having you pick up a stick and throw it for a dog. And I just thought that was such a great way of being able to do that. So we have it on the screen now. They're sort of throwing the stick on the earth and there goes the dog. Oh, awesome. And now they're going to say, they actually use an Alexa to change it to the moon and then they throw it on the moon and of course, you know, it goes really, really far. And then they say, Alexa, change it to Mars, which now everybody who's watching with an Alexa, something just changed on theirs. But that was really cool. There's also another one that used data, visual data from NASA and turned it into music. And they did that because they wanted people to be able to sort of look at data in a different way. But they also said one of the big reasons they wanted to make it was for people who are visually impaired so that way they could process the data themselves and understand what they're hearing. And just like the amazing creativity that comes out of these competitions is just absolutely mind blowing with that. Yeah. And in judging these, what do you look at when you're judging these apps? Yeah, so we look at so many different things. When we started judging space apps, we had a couple of categories. So we started with disruption and really wanted to be sure that we were addressing what are the apps that are going to be most disruptive? What are the ones that are going to help people are going to change the way business is done? We looked at most innovative. What were the apps that people did the newest thing that nobody, the most creative thing that no one had ever done before? We looked at best use of data. What are the apps where people took data and used that to drive their solution? Because part of our mandate in the Open Government Initiative was to take that data and let it be leveraged for public use. It's part of NASA's mission. It's part of the vision of Open Government. We really wanted to see it happen. We did galactic impact. What is the solution that will influence the most number of people? And we did most inspiring. We wanted to look at what's the app that people get excited about looking up at the stars? There was one one year that we really love that one most inspiring that looked at use of the data of flyovers in the space station. And you could look up at that and send a little text message to the crew members on station and they could send a text message back to you. Just a little touch from space that would give you and me the opportunity to feel like our day had intersected. So we really looked at those things. Disruption, innovation, data, impact, and inspiration as being the things that we wanted to that we wanted to award because it's so interesting, right? The normal hackathon world, what we're funding is is business opportunity. Like in the normal hackathon world, they're paying you to compete against that guy that your idea would be better and that they could make the most profit off of it. We didn't want to see that in space apps. What we wanted to see in space apps was compelling people in a powerful way to come together not to compete but to collaborate and to let that collaboration be good for everyone. So that's kind of how we chose those categories. Later, we added about mission concepts. We added about hardware, best use of hardware. Started to come in as makers got more involved, 3D printing got more involved. We're some of the categories we expanded to as well. And since you've been involved in space apps for so long, what are some of the biggest challenges that you see when teams come together and have to work to try to make these happen? Yeah, so I think for teams coming together, the interesting thing is putting the right people on the right challenge a lot of time and asking good questions. I'm a program manager professionally. So I kind of love to get in there at Hackathons and help people go, why are you picking this challenge? Why does that matter to you? Do you have all the right skills to address this one? And asking those questions early on, I think is the real key to helping teams get going and not get stuck because the teams that have problems are the ones that they either went after the glossy challenge and not the challenge they were actually skilled for or and we've gotten so much better at this early on in space apps. What we recognized was the data was not always as available or as clean as we wanted it to be. And as the data was kind of not very available, teams were spending the entire Hackathon trying to get access to the data they needed to get the project done. And so that was a big stumbling block. But we've done a great job I think at NASA of equipping those local event leads so that they ask those questions early on so that they really empower people and get them excited. There's always a few hangers on when you come into a Hackathon, you build some teams when you have a few people who are like, where do I fit? What can I help with? And so helping them find a place so that they don't spend the whole Hackathon just watching other people are feeling un-involved. So help the researchers find the research jobs, help the designers find the design jobs. But from the beginning, in our view, the big key to success was having the right challenges ready to go. So, because that's what the public doesn't know, right? The public has the expertise. The public has the insight and has the perspective. You build the team, right? The team can share that stuff, but they have to know what to work on because what you don't want is to have everybody do the same challenge, right? Everybody say, well, let's figure out how to 3D print in space. Well, somebody's already doing that. Like, that's a great thing. If you have a new idea, let's look at it, but let's do the things nobody's doing. Let's expand the knowledge. Let's get the insight going so that new things can happen. One year, my favorite challenge is I was at an event with a guy who was an architect. And the challenge was develop a foldable origami greenhouse for use on other planets. And so he took all his knowledge based as an architect, but we actually had a couple of kids who had done a ton of origami. And so they're like, no, fold this way, you know, and like little kids who are digital natives, they were quicker to technology sometimes. These kids were so quick to origami and they were so quick to have insights and see things differently that they worked together with this architect. He was a great, incredible guy who put all his knowledge into that and all of a sudden they had a really compelling response to that project. And they thought about things that a room full of engineers who all saw the problem one way hadn't ever thought about it. And so that's how we love to mobilize teams. And I think that's the key to the success of making them quickly feel impactful. What were some of the biggest surprises you've had during your time at the space apps? You know, the first year, my biggest surprise was that it worked so well. It just worked so well. Like we had this great idea. I was in Jakarta that first year and we're like, oh, well, it's going to look good. We'll just see if it works so well. I think after that event, my surprise was people got excited about the projects. They got excited about the products, the project products. We were excited about the people. We were excited about, hey, the product is awesome, but if I can envision a person, they could have 1,000 projects buried inside them and that person all of a sudden can do more than that one project is ever going to be in visionary about. And so in the beginning, it took a lot of energy because we're trying to shift people's focus. Like, yeah, that was awesome. Those projects are cool, but stop asking me about the projects. Ask me about the people. Ask me about what happens when a room full of people get excited about space. Ask me what happens when all of a sudden, everybody sees that they can have a hand in exploration. And so as those things happen, I think my next surprise was watching that it kept going and it never ended. And I hope it never does. My team ran space apps for three years before we handed it off to others. And when we made that handoff, we're like, okay, what's going to happen? We weren't sure what was going to happen. And I love that every year they're coming up with hundreds and thousands of new, incredible, innovative projects. NASA sometimes feels like we're the ones who have to give people permission to play in space. We're the ones who have to get or get to, maybe not have to get to give people a role. And what I love about space apps, I think that surprised me was recognizing people don't need any permission. People don't need any blessing from NASA or anywhere else. People have this vision and once we can activate them in that they're going to do incredible things. And I think I've loved seeing NASA step back and see the value in space apps. It's been really compelling and beautiful to see. And if people would like to participate in the upcoming space apps competition, where can they go to learn about that? Yeah, so go check out Space Apps Challenge, appschallenge.org. And on SpaceAppChallenge.org, you can find a map of all the locations coming up in October. You can register for any of them, get more information, see like we were saying about the themes that were involved there. You can also reach out to, if you have a couple of events you're interested in, reach out to their local lead and talk with them and say, hey, here's my background. Hey, should I come? Hey, what's going on at it? Hey, what's the schedule? And they'll give you all the more information about the event that you're particularly interested in. And is there information about the virtual participation there as well? Yes, virtual participation is listed as one of the locations there. So you can just sign up for that and it'll tell you kind of what the plan is and where to get involved. They're also pretty active on Twitter. So at Space Apps, you can always reach out to and they should help direct you to if you are a Twitter person. All right, Ali Luan, co-founder of Space Apps. And if you really want to get involved in the competition, highly recommend that you go because you've got just a handful of weeks now to get yourself ready. So you know, get your coat and see if you're good to go or if you're like me, get your hammers ready to fly. We'll make that end up happening. So, oh boy, what an exciting thing to talk about today. And of course, we wouldn't be able to talk about these things without your help. 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