LaserMotive Does DC
Written by Tom Nugent on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
As we mentioned before, NASA held a technical symposium and recognition ceremony on February 25th and 26th for all the 2009 Centennial Challenge winners and the allied organizations which ran the competitions. Twitter comments were at #nasacc. Will Pomerantz from the X-Prize Foundation wrote a great summary of the event.
During the Power Beaming session on the 25th, Jordin and Tom gave a presentation on LaserMotive’s technology development for the competition, and the directions we see power beaming going in the future. We were joined in that session by Brian Turner from KCSP, and Ben Shelef from the Spaceward Foundation.
The presentations from the other Challenges were uniformly interesting. As Will Pomerantz commented, it seemed to be true for every competition that “the teams that shared the most information with the general public eventually won the competition.” Over the last few years, we tried sharing what we were doing, and I’d like to work on sharing even more this year. The biggest obstacle is time.
It was interesting, in the middle of the day during the symposium, to hear NASA’s new Chief Technologist, Bob Braun, speak about his new job and his thoughts on the future. And as I tweeted, it was very refreshing to hear someone in his position admit that he didn’t have an answer to a question and, rather than making something up or being non-committal, he said he would work on finding an answer.
The next day was the recognition ceremony. We were honored to be recognized by NASA Administrator Charles Bolden.
We’re all excited to hear the messages coming from both Chief Technology Braun and Administrator Bolden. They both seem to “get it” and are working to move NASA in the direction of innovating new technologies and supporting industry as they try to innovate, rather than simply operating ‘traditional’ systems. We have high hopes for what we’ll see coming out of NASA in the next few years.
After the ceremony, teams from all the various Challenges got up on stage for one big group photo:
Many thanks to NASA IPP DIrector Doug Comstock and Centennial Challenges Director Andrew Petro for all their hard work for the event!