NASA Astronaut Ron Garan this week helped the White House kick off the latest iteration of LAUNCH – a business innovation challenge grant program for new technologies for a sustainable future.
The program is a partnership of NASA, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the State Department, and NIKE, and serves as a testbed for collaboration across non-traditional disciplines and organizations, bringing innovative solutions to difficult sustainability challenges. And the connection between orbital and surface challenges for the earth is not just one of scale. As Garan describes it
“Specifically, LAUNCH draws parallels between resource challenges humans face onboard the International Space Station and those on Earth. Think about it: we have no natural resources in the hostile environment of space, which forces us to generate, collect, store, conserve, recycle, and manage our resources wisely — just like we must on Earth. LAUNCH offers NASA’s problem-solving expertise to crucial conversations on sustainability-related topics with innovative problem solvers from around the world. It enables NASA to promote emerging, transformative technology to sustain and enrich the quality of life on Earth. After all, the engineering approaches needed to solve many of the development challenges facing our planet have a lot in common with those needed to overcome the challenges of long-duration human missions beyond low-Earth orbit.
Astronaut Ron Garan
We’ve specifically selected the LAUNCH challenges to tell the space station sustainability story: the life support systems that sustain our astronauts aboard the station are the same as those that support inhabitants of the amazing spacecraft we are all riding on together through the universe: Earth. Previous LAUNCH forums investigated challenges to our planet relating to Water, Energy, and Health.
LAUNCH: Beyond Waste [the latest initiative] seeks ten game-changing innovations with the potential to transform current waste management systems and practices. This issue not only threatens our natural resources on Earth but also affects how we design spacecraft and missions to transport humans beyond Earth’s atmosphere. In fact, 40% of packaging for supplies we send up to the crew living onboard the space station is discarded as waste. We need to figure out a better way to use this material as feedstock, rather than excess. We need to design closed-loop systems with a goal of zero waste for long-duration space missions.”
(Source: White House Statement)
The LAUNCH: Beyond Waste challenge will accept proposals from April 1 to May 15, 2012, for innovative designs for zero waste solutions, waste elimination, waste transformation, and waste mitigation technologies, as well as waste reduction-focused education, business, and financial strategies that have the potential to reduce and/or eliminate waste at a household, community, office building, campus, or industrial level.
Ten LAUNCH innovators will be selected to present technology solutions at the LAUNCH forum and receive networking and mentoring opportunities from influential business and government leaders. Following the forum, each innovator receives individualized support in the LAUNCH Accelerator phase, led by USAID, to help apply recommendations from the forum. For more information on how to apply see the LAUNCH Beyond Waste website
More on the LAUNCH Collaborative is explained in the video below
NASA Astronaut Ron Garan this week helped the White House kick off the latest iteration of LAUNCH – a business innovation challenge grant program for new technologies for a sustainable future.