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Space Apps 2015 Winners for Cygnus Launch | Facebook

Pictures from the December 2 social for Space Apps 2015 Global and KSC Winners, along with the Cygnus Orb-4 launch attempts viewings on Decemeber 3 and 4. The launch occurred on December 6.

Space Apps Social on Sept 1

The Space Apps Kennedy Space Center (KSC) team is hosting a social next Tuesday night, September 1, starting at 5 p.m. at Fishlips in Cape Canaveral. The social is also a KSC Launching Leaders and Spaceport Innovators networking opportunity; everyone in the Central Florida community is welcome.

Additionally, global winners of the 2015 International Space Apps Challenge Galactic Impact Award from Italy are in town for a tour the next day and will be at the social. Of the 949 projects created over the Space Apps weekend back in April, Cultures Risks Observation and Prevention Platform (CROPP) was one of six global winners. Locals who are interested in or have participated in Space Apps will also attend.

We will be upstairs in the covered patio area and will have a Space Apps posters. Everyone will be responsible for paying for their own food and drink.

Please feel free to invite others. The event is on Facebook and Meetup.

Indie Galactic Space Jam 2015

Hundreds gathered at the Orlando Science Center on Thursday, August 13 for Nerd Nite Orlando XXX: Gaming & Space Nite. Nerd Nite Orlando, a monthly gathering featuring geeky talks over drinks, brought in five speakers bringing different perspectives to the gaming and space industry. Annie Caraccio, a chemical engineer at NASA Kennedy Space Center (KSC), spoke on the In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) Technology Development Project and the MARCO POLO project for Mars exploration. Other speakers discussed the astronomy of the Mayans, gaming directly from the brain, the new commercialization occurring in the space industry, and tips for developing a game over a weekend (aka jamming).

Nerd Nite XXX helped kickoff the 2nd annual Indie Galactic Space Jam, a video game development marathon focusing on space-themes at the Orlando Library’s Melrose Center August 14-16. Over 130 game developers, artists, musicians, space professionals and more spent their weekend coming up with 26 different games.

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Idea generators pitched game concepts Friday night and developers formed teams around the concepts they found interesting. Each team gave a four minute pitch of the brand new game they’d built on Sunday evening. The game types were video, deck, board, motion sensor input, investigative story exploration, video + robot, and more.

Space Apps KSC brought in volunteers from the space center to help the developers get a sense the actual challenges and environments in space while the games concepts were still crystallizing. There were also space center employees among the developers. The developers incorporated the information at their own discretion, as enticing game play they could develop quickly was often their focus.

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Reflecting the diversity of the games, questions related to exercising and fixing equipment in microgravity, orbital mechanics, ISRU, what solar system miners might post on Twitter in the future, the gravity fields of asteroids, and more. Many developers chose a game concept inspired by something they learned at the Nerd Nite XXX and asked us to elaborate on those topics.

Additionally, Space Apps KSC created a webpage of game ideas and resources prior to the jam. The game ideas include ones KSC employee brainstormed on and also Space Apps challenges over the years which lent themselves to becoming games. Several of the projects solved the 3-2-1 LIFTOFF: Launch that Rocket!, Bodies in Spacey Motion and Asteroid Prospector.

Sponsors awarded prizes for three challenges: Best in the Universe, Florida Landmark and Launch, and Kinect.

Astro Clash Cosmo Smash, an arena sport played by astronauts on the International Space Station video game, won Space Florida’s Best of the Universe Challenge, which came with $5,000. The judges also recognized Warped, Galagan’s Island: Cosmic Corival, and Puppies in Space as runners up.

Junk Space, an orbital debris video game, won Florida’s Space Coast’s Launch & Landmark Challenge. The prize included a weekend stay at the Best Western Cocoa Beach for five separate guests, five tickets to the Kennedy Space Center Visitors Complex including lunch with an astronaut, and $1,500 from We Are Go For Launch.

Destroids, a missile launch game defending Florida from asteroids, won Microsoft’s Kinect Challenge, which came with five Xbox Ones.

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The Orlando Sentinel covered the event and created a video with footage from across the weekend.

2015 KSC Space Apps WINNERS!

Here at Kennedy Space Center (KSC), we’ve had our challenge owners assemble panels and review all the video for their challenge. Via some tough decisions, they selected winning projects from the eligible submissions; some panels also chose to recognize teams for honorable mention.

We’re proud to announce this year’s KSC Space Apps Challenge winners:

We also had a separate panel of KSC judges review the winning project videos and select an overall KSC Space Apps Challenge winner: Eye of Horus - Open Source Eye Assistance.

We enjoyed seeing the work done by all the teams and appreciate the time spent to create and explain your projects. The challenges relate to current work of those on the KSC judging panels, whether the teams were putting together design ideas or educational tools to communicate the work to the public. See teams around the world working on the KSC Challenges with our Storify.

We have playlists on our SpaceAppsKSC YouTube channel with all the videos (or links to those on Vimeo in the playlist description) for each challenge. We’ve also created a playlist to capture winners of KSC challenges from 2013 and on, including the videos of this year’s four winners.

Member of winning teams: KSC will be contacting you later this month concerning the prizes. The prizes will be in relation to Kennedy Space Center. Eye of Horus - Open Source Eye Assistance may receive a different prize from the other teams.

*This team, due to a video length significantly greater than one minute, was not eligible for KSC judging. However, the judges did view it and merit it for honorable mention, which has no associated prize.

Connecting Kennedy Space Center with the World

One of the most exciting aspects of proposing challenges for the International Space Apps Challenge is connecting work we do every day at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) with people around the globe. We see the projects come in, admiring their creativity, innovation, and grasp of our technical work.

For projects working on KSC challenges in 2015, 4 out of 5 the projects came from outside the United States. Nations from all continents participated, with nearly a third of KSC challenge projects coming from Europe. The most submittals from a single location was Cairo, Egypt (5); England (7) had the most of any country.

The KSC challenge project developed the furthest from us was Wearable Bot Guiding Glove in Bangalore, India, over 9,000 miles away from Cape Canaveral, Florida!

For all projects working on KSC projects, links are available here. They can also be found be visiting the individual challenge pages and selecting the Projects tab.

KSC Judging - Eligible Projects!

The following projects are eligible for Kennedy Space Center (KSC) Space Apps Challenge judging. Thanks so much to everyone that worked on one of the four KSC challenges. We got some amazingly creative ideas out of it! The challenge owners and others in their field are reviewing these projects and selecting winners for each challenge.

Below, select the challenge to go to a YouTube playlist of videos for that challenge; any Vimeo videos are linked in the playlist’s description. Select a project to go to its project page. You can also see all the projects that attempted a KSC Challenge with this Google spreadsheet.

3-2-1 LIFTOFF: Launch that Rocket!
• We Go to the Moon (Apollo 11 / Saturn V) Model
• Project 42
• Go, No-Go
• Launch Vehicle Selection & Trade Analysis
• Launch Pad board game
• Lift Off
• Launch Window
• GalacticApp

Bodies in Spacey Motion
• FlappyNauta
• Project Chronos

Space Wearables: Designing for Today’s Launch & Research Stars
• We go to Mars
• SmartWork Suit
• The Personal Display
• Blastastic Fashion
• Interactive Interpersonal Space System
• NASA-SpaceHack-Wearable-2015
• Anti gravity (gravity) suit for Astronauts
• GAJTANLESS
• SmartArm
• Eye of Horus - Open Source Eye Assistance
• Super Enhanced Field-of-View

Survivor: Mars Lava Tubes
• Mars Scout
• Simulation Survival Game
• Humans On Mars
• Lavamatic
• The Mars Endeavour: Lava Tubes
• Crashed: Survival on Mars
• Survivor: Mars Lava Tubes by ZAFT
• One year on Mars
• Mars Base One

There were several projects that submitted videos significantly longer than the 1 minute limit. Though those projects did some amazing work and we will be looking at their work also, they are not eligible for KSC judging. The video length was posted in the announcement on KSC judging.