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I think prizes and competitions
present NASA with a huge opportunity
to put a new tool in our tool belt as an agency
to think about how we engage with people outside of NASA
to solve problems.
So traditionally we've had a few different ways
that we've worked with folks outside of NASA,
contracts, grants, Space Act Agreements.
Prizes are a whole new way
for us to think about engaging people
towards our exploration mission,
so I would hope that we would leverage prizes
a lot more in the future
to think about allowing people outside of government
to come and work with us in new and interesting ways
that they haven't had an opportunity before
because they're not a registered contractor
or an eligible grantee or a member of the university
at this time in their life.
So to me I think there's a lot of ingenuity out there
in the American people,
and I would love to think about ways
we could tap into all of that
through leveraging prize competitions
to get us closer towards our exploration objectives.
NASA is using prizes and challenges
in a variety of different ways
for a variety of really, really good benefits.
The three primary benefits that we're seeing at NASA
include bringing new perspectives
and new disciplines to bear
on problems that we've had for a long time, number one.
Number two bringing in folks
other than just the usual suspects
to work with NASA on solving our problems.
And third really, really seeing cost effectiveness
and leverage on taxpayer dollars.
So we're getting maximum *** for our buck
on the money that we're spending.
So a few examples of that are a prize competition
that we actually ran to try to figure out
how to protect astronauts
from radiation and space a bit better,
and interestingly the solution
that ended up winning that particular prize competition
came from a retired radio frequency engineer
in New Hampshire
that had never really worked with NASA on a problem before
but whose expertise when applied to this problem
was able to get us to an algorithm
that predicted solar flares 8 hours in advance
to an 85-percent accuracy, which was pretty remarkable.
There are many, many other examples of NASA
seeing great results from our use of prize competitions,
and there are several ways
actually now that the public can get involved.
We have several platforms that the public
can visit and participate in NASA prize competitions.
One is called the NASA Tournament Lab,
the second is the NASA Innovation Pavilion,
and the third
that you can read more about at www.nasa.gov/challenges,
is the Centennial Challenges Program.