 Hey everyone. Good morning. Good morning everybody. Thank you all for coming out first thing in the morning to hear my talk How do you become a space hacker? Let's hack outer space the final frontier My name is Mike Caprio, and I am a software developer an instructor and a community organizer Like many of you out there in the audience But since I first became involved in space hacking just three years ago I've been an advisor for NASA and the White House Office of Science and Technology policy and Was selected for a brainstorming team focused on rallying the world's resources to defend the earth from asteroids And I'm here to tell you that you too can become a space hacker. I Like to start with a short video from an event we organized earlier this year. My name is Katie Coleman I'm a NASA astronaut, and I am here at my very first space apps competition And we've done some great solutions in terms of getting the data down to the earth That we need to understand the earth to understand exploring space But we can't analyze it all and we need people here to help us analyze that data My name is Matt Thompson. I'm the general manager for technology evangelism across the US from Microsoft The reason why we're here fundamentally is because we believe innovation happens in organizations like this people come together to solve Kind of multi-dimensional problems. We want a thousand great ideas to get started. We love to hack So we're here just helping people build on their ideas Hi, I'm Ron Garan. I'm a former astronaut I became involved with a space app challenge for a number of reasons one is the Solution to a lot of the problems facing our planet are technical solutions But I think more important than that the collaboration itself is an incredible asset It's an incredible mechanism for us to put the pieces of the puzzle together really that will help us solve our greatest challenges You've got resources we've got coaches you've got skills that people are getting you've got hard problems And you have people who have a passion for solving I'm involved with this because it's so exciting. It's like so exciting to see what comes of it Not just this weekend, but what comes after this weekend, you know, what grows from the seeds that are planted here Things are happening at this space apps challenge So since 2012 NASA has annually held the international space apps challenge a mass collaboration focused on space exploration That takes place over a weekend at locations all across the globe It's the largest hackathon in the world and it's a completely locally organized grassroots volunteer event NASA puts forth the challenges and provides guidance, but all the funding logistics and solution making is done by unpaid volunteers Anyone from the general public is invited to attend and NASA requires that no admission be charged for attending I Have the privilege of organizing all four events in New York City with the help of local nonprofits And I'm proud to say we've established an 1100 member space hacker community with around 300 members active in a meetup.com group Actually, let me put back the other slide in case you didn't get the info there NASA chose New York to be the global main stage for space apps in 2014 and 2015 And this year was our most successful year yet with nearly 400 people attending in addition to our annual hackathon We also hosted NASA's first women in data bootcamp aimed at increasing diversity and participation in hackathons And our inaugural space conference of renowned speakers all of which you can find on YouTube at the space videos link at the bottom of the screen This year we were invited by Microsoft our top level sponsor to their headquarters in Times Square Where they gave us two floors of the building all weekend long for the hackathon at the conference We had people lining up as early as 5 a.m To take part and our space hackers produced close to 30 projects with one of our teams producing a global prize-winning solution So I'm just going to show you a few of NASA's own slides on their mission briefing for the statistics of space apps You can see this year's participation was completely overwhelming Truly worldwide participation and a great deal of it right here in Europe This page you can see the explosive growth of the event over four events in a three-year period 2,500 projects open-source public domain projects have been created in just three years And tens of thousands of people have taken part and we're not just talking about techies Only about a third of the attendees self identified as Software developers this year and the rest were a broad mix of diverse interdisciplinary people Space apps is in many ways a misnomer as it's not just about apps and it's not all about space Many challenges have to do with solving problems right here on earth regarding issues around climate agriculture and clean water Solutions to challenges can involve robotics data visualization hardware design and educational curriculums or displays This diverse mix of people is exactly what NASA is looking for They want to crowdsource new ideas and they want them to come from voices outside of their mainstream and This is why they initiated their women in data bootcamp and followed it up with their data knots program I'm proud to say that space apps NYC has been gender balanced and diverse from our very first event And we were even able to provide on-site child care this year for all of our participants All the solutions built at the event must be submitted under an open-source initiative license that permits the free and open dissemination of the work Just like everything else. Thank you Just like everything else NASA produces all the projects created at space apps must be placed into the public domain for anyone in the world To use for any purpose you can access any of NASA's resources at the four sites here and use their software data code Any imagery for any purpose even commercial purposes? So you might be thinking to yourself. Okay. Well a space hackathon is pretty cool But do you really get to work with NASA? Well, the answer is yes, you absolutely can work with NASA teams from all over the world over the last three years have been approached by NASA after space apps and have Even been offered the potential of contracting to continue their work on their projects So I'll offer the recent ISE three reboot project as further proof to show that NASA is happy to work with outside parties If you didn't hear about this last year a small team of space hackers led by Dennis Wingo Raced between ground stations all over the world in an attempt to salvage an abandoned NASA spacecraft from 1976 that observed the solar winds and was redirected to fly through the tail of a comet Dennis Wingo is probably the ultimate space hacker He specializes in resurrecting decades-old technology and he does it with small teams of so-called amateurs His team reconstructed a radio using GNU radio software to reestablish contact with the ISE three And he was able to execute several maneuvers with it But ultimately discovered the craft had lost its fuel and the team could not bring it back to an orbit around the earth All right into the Lagrange points But as long as his team was able to continue meeting gating requirements that NASA had established for their mission NASA continued aiding their effort and working with them NASA wants to work with the public and wants to further commercial space initiatives And you can see that video at the link at the bottom there on YouTube NASA will even launch satellites for you if you meet the requirements of their CubeSat launch initiative They will launch a CubeSat for free as an auxiliary payload on one of their regular missions The CubeSat design is a modular system 10 centimeters on a side that can literally contain any kind of equipment up to a designated weight a Variety of types of CubeSat have been successfully launched using equipment like arduinos and smartphones for computing power and all manner of sensors and systems You may have heard of Bill Nye the science guy He had his recent light sail Kickstarter project which is testing the use of solar power for propulsion of CubeSats The slide is a little bit out of date actually since his light sail campaign raised something like a million and a half dollars in crowd funding But it's not just NASA who's looking to collaborate with the public in the exploration of space Last year SpaceSaps NYC was approached by the American Museum of Natural History to help them organize their first ever Overnight hackathon hack the universe in the Hayden Planetarium The museum wanted to innovate and make its data available for participants to make open source visualizations and tools that would ultimately become exhibits or research aides I Have to say there is probably nothing cooler than space hacking next to an actual meteorite This was only the second time in history that the museum allowed adults to stay overnight in the museum they fed us they gave us places to sleep and Of course if you need to hack through the night, there's only one beverage of choice to drink and I made sure it was there Mixed reaction. Yeah, it worked About 30 projects were produced in just over 24 hours using the museum's known universe API Which you can actually access yourself at the URL below Another project that the Museum of Natural History has been working on in collaboration with Linköping University in Sweden Is an open source suite of space simulation tools called open space? The museum wants to grow an open source development public community around these tools Which can be used on any platform to render actual simulations of outer space as recently occurred during the new horizons fly by a Pluto Who wants to make a space game on a VR headset anybody? So I'm going to show another video and this is an actual demonstration of the open space suite showing new horizons When it did its Jupiter gravity boost oops No, I went ahead too far This type of imagery was actually used or I'm sorry. This type of simulation was actually used by PBS NASA used it themselves for the Applied physics laboratory at Johns Hopkins when they did a simulation of the actual moments of Pluto fly by happening at the Museum of Natural History They had this great event called breakfast at Pluto and here you can see that They're using actual NASA telemetry. So they're using what they call a spice file to Position the satellite exactly are the spacecraft exactly in space and then the actual images that the spacecraft took Showing that that field of view there when it did imaging of the Great Red Spot as it did its fly by of Jupiter And they did the same thing for Pluto except they didn't have the imagery yet So now they can actually do the same thing and create simulations of Pluto with the data that's coming back from the New Horizons spacecraft You can learn more about open space and take part in its development by signing up for the AM and H mailing list at the link here Or directly on the link shipping website at the link below So lastly, I'd like to mention that true to the mission of NASA's incubator innovation goal with the space apps challenge I'm in the process of creating a space technology accelerator in New York I'm calling it Empire Space Labs, and I'm currently working with a stealth hardware startup and a company called space VR Space VR is launching a 3d 360 degree virtual reality camera to the International Space Station And is currently running its own crowdfunding campaign to pay for the launch costs The successful launch of overview one into space will be a turning point in the new era of virtual exploration of space Allowing anyone with a smartphone tablet computer or VR headset to experience what it's like to be an astronaut Space VR is working with nano racks for launch services with made in space to 3d print the housing of the camera on station and an ISS astronaut to assemble the camera and film content with it If anyone here in the camp has a VR headset I would be happy to hook you up some really cool footage that is unreleased that space VR camera has actually taken so far So I want to invite everybody to come hang out in the space village We can we're going to have a party on Saturday night You can come by and buy a model rocket check out some awesome do-it-yourself space hacker projects and chat with us about the future of space exploration We'll be having a party on Saturday night with free food and drinks sponsored by space VR Thanks for coming up So I'm happy to answer any questions. Yeah, we have about 15 minutes of Q&A We have two mics. There's one stage right and one stage life If you have any questions, just go to the mics queue up and I'll tell you when it's your turn Anybody it's really early We're all still waking up. No questions Can you go to the mic, please? Thank you Hello there. Thanks very much for the talk. It was really cool Quick question. What would you say would be the Maybe most important biggest or or whatever challenge you think people in this room could have a go at trying solving in space Really interesting question. I would say So so this year the international space apps challenge actually had four themes of challenges earth space Humans and robotics they identified these as the main themes of the challenges. So, you know humans in space you can talk about things like medical breakthroughs or studying different types of Conditions that astronauts go through in space. So bone loss Understanding things about medical devices doing testing of stuff in space right now. They have the year in space Program that commander Kelly is doing where they're going to test the changes in his body over the course of a year You could potentially design an experiment that could be sent up to the space station that would help test These medical conditions in fact NASA through their nonprofit arm cases Cases is the center for the advancement of science in space And they're another avenue that people can work with to get free consulting to get their stuff onto the space station They're specifically looking for organ on a chip Proposals right now. So people want to do testing and remove for the constant of gravity in their experiments They could do stuff for medical advancements testing in space Just as one example for humans robotics, obviously, there's all kinds of need for Different types of robotic applications both on earth and in space This year space apps challenge space apps in Cyprus, which held a very successful event this year was also chosen for a Prize for their drone development They built a 3d 3d or laser cut and printed a drone that both had feet to actuate on the station and Propellers for motion through the station. So just multi-purpose aid for astronauts in space as a robotic assistant Yeah, I mean really literally any challenge is sort of out there for people to work on a lot of them are really important I don't know if I really want to prioritize any one over the other But those four themes are kind of the areas of interest that we're exploring right now Stage left, please you Hello. Yeah, okay When you organize something like a space apps hackathon Where do you get the Expertise from because you know, I've been considering doing something like this for high school kids Simply to get them Opened up for you know Pursuing an opportunity in aerospace. Yep But it's very difficult. I mean I live in Belgium. It's very difficult to find Experts who are willing to volunteer time and know how certainly and you know, well just getting a few Noobs into this and teaching other kids is not well May not be responsible. I will say You know, it takes time to grow community as well Even though in New York, we have 1100 members now our first year We only had about 80 sign ups and 40 participants So it's the kind of thing when you start small and then you kind of grow out and the same is true of getting mentors We've had mentors who have come in like the second year and have come back every year afterwards You know, we have astrophysicists. I mean people who are at local universities folks who are engineers, you know Just mechanical design people. I mean really anyone can mentor anyone else That's kind of the the whole point of space apps is that anyone can come and try to work on these problems And they can share their expertise and share their knowledge with each other and almost kind of self mentor You know same kind of principle with like a hacker space So, you know, if you are lucky enough to have a real domain expert in space or in biology or in whatever in your area You know, I mean just keep reaching out. I mean eventually you'll find folks will will everyone gets excited about space so When you reach out enough long enough and enough times you'll get people that will be interested Yeah, stage left again, please. It's kind of a related question. It's the same question with If you want to host a hackathon say in Amsterdam or on the European soil because a lot of the resources are US based There's there's one contact NASA or is it through a cell or what is that process? I might have missed that early on in the short. So the space apps challenge you can go to space apps challenge org That's the main website. It is global I mean the the the application process happens. It will be happening probably in early fall this year You just go and you fill out a form and you say I'm interested in hosting in this area If there are already other people that are hosting NASA takes care of the job of connecting you with those people So you're basically get you get all these great organizational resources You become part of a community of space apps organizers who are connected through Like IRC or Skype or they host global calls and multiple time zones It's really it really is an amazing fantastic effort on their part They're working with a public-private cooperative cooperative agency called second muse To sort of help them with all the they contract out to them to help them organize on the ground I mean the whole point really of the space apps challenge is it acts as this Separate entity that is not truly NASA but is affiliated in a sense. It's not Sponsored by it's not backed by there's no material support that comes from NASA It's just a mandate and the challenges themselves which gets sent out and then it's all grassroots Locally organized. I mean we have sites that are I mean New York is one of the biggest sites in the world But we have sites that are just a bunch of folks in a hacker space that are hacking on something really cool And they're just they're treated as equally as any other site in the world Any more questions anybody? No, okay, then please thank Mike again