LAUNCH: Innovative Sustainability Program Creates Niche Audience
- Paper number
IAC-12,E1,7,8,x13138
- Author
Ms. Beth Beck, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), United States
- Year
2012
- Abstract
Sparks fly when innovative thinkers join together to address critical issues — like solving the world’s sustainability problems. LAUNCH is a unique initiative formed by founding partners NASA, USAID, Department of State, and NIKE to identify solutions to the world’s most urgent sustainability challenges. LAUNCH offers NASA an opportunity to create a niche audience within the sustainability circles where none existed before. This non-traditional participatory engagement approach lets NASA share the sustainability story of space, while allowing participants to make personal connections between human existence in the extreme environment of space and gravity-bound realities of citizens living on this planet. As thought leaders in their fields, LAUNCH participants create unique space-inspired innovation stories to share with their communities. LAUNCH identifies innovations poised to create transformational change in critical sustainability issues, and connects the selected innovators to 30-40 thought leaders and advisors. After each forum, the LAUNCH team works with the innovators to take recommendations compiled during the 2+ days at the Forum, and implement the recommendations to help propel the innovations toward success. LAUNCH: Energy, our third sustainability forum, follows LAUNCH: Water and LAUNCH: Health. Issues of sustainable energy are part of every human and robotic mission off of the planet. We have NO natural energy sources off the planet; therefore, the creation, storage, conservation and replenishing of energy is one of our challenges in exploring the unknowns of space. NASA’s problem-solving expertise and the convening power of the NASA brand enables us to host a crucial conversation about transformative technologies that may solve problems we share as global citizens of this planet – which may well solve corresponding issues of long-duration human missions in the extremes of space. The ten LAUNCH: Energy innovators offer a variety of solutions to address energy sustainability challenges. The innovations include an economical fuel cell that can be recharged in a cooking fire, a thin flexible electrochromic film that can be applied to windows or surfaces to manage energy use, a low temperature heat activated fluid motion pump, a hydrokinetic turbine, a 96% efficient wood combustion cookstove process, a thermal energy battery for economical refrigeration in remote locations, a next generation fast-charging, long-lasting ultracapacitor battery, an integrated smart microgrid, a lightweight energy management system, and a solar-powered lantern/charger. Special thanks to the innovators for caring enough about the future of our human race to create transformative solutions.
- Abstract document
- Manuscript document
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