A busy day at Ames continued to drive home the point that NASA has too many random cool projects for anybody to actually keep track of.

 Did you know that there are people working on:

  • Bacteria that can extract resources from lunar regolith?
  • Self-diagnostic spacecraft systems?
  • Self-flying helicopters?
  • Actually easy-to-use data collection systems that tie multiple users and collection methods together automatically?
  • Smart flight traffic controllers that without any additional technology could several-fold more flights in the US with fewer delays (theoretically)?

 And that’s just what I learned about in the past two days, at a single NASA center. 

I think the same problem of overabundant excellent but smaller projects exists in the private space sector as well. Just like they only think of ‘space shuttle’ or ‘mars rover’ when you say ‘NASA,’ most people just think ‘SpaceX’ when you say ‘private space exploration.’  There’s got to be a good way to expand awareness of awesome.