NASA Turns To Freelancers To Solve Challenges In Space Exploration

In a sign of just how far the freelance economy has come, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration ( NASA ) is turning to members of the talent marketplace Freelancer to create tools and technology involved in space exploration. In a pilot project, it has been posting competitions called challenges on the freelance site, which has a community of more than 16 million registered users.  Members of the site have been entering to vie for cash prizes. One current NASA contest is to design a smartwatch app for astronauts to use in completing daily tasks on the international space station. The prize is $1,500.

NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI), through the NASA Tournament Lab (NTL), has partnered with Freelancer.com. The total prize money is less than $10,000, with prizes ranging from $50 to $3,000. When someone wins, NASA pays the prize money, and Freelancer.com deducts a percentage of the prize amount as its fee for the job, as it does with other projects on the site.

“We have lots and lots of hard problems we’re trying to solve,” says Steve Rader, NASA Johnson Space Center Deputy Manager at the CoECI. “NASA is about getting the biggest bang for its buck. This allows us to involve the public.”

To solve more advanced problems using crowdsourcing, NASA works through platforms such as InnoCentive, NineSigma, Appirio and TopCoder.

One of NASA’s mandates is to help the public understand space and participate whenever possible.  “When they win a contest they say I never thought I could contribute to NASA and be a part of it,” says Rader.

One recent challenge on Freelancer involved developing CAD models of tools to be used by the Robonaut 2 (R2) on the International Space Station. R2—the first humanoid robot in space--is an assistant to astronauts and will use the tools in its daily chores. The tools will be representative of the ones R2 will need on the ground or in orbit, including RFID scanners and drills.

Other ongoing challenges include one to create app concepts that use disruption tolerant networking protocols (prize: $500), design a 3D printable trophy for NASA’s internal crowdsourcing platform NASA@work (prize:$200) and to design a Logistics Reduction Program logo that embodies the government program’s mission to reduce dependence on earth resupply for space missions (prize $150),

Once NASA pays the prize money for winning submissions, Freelancer facilitates the transfer of the intellectual property to NASA.  For most of the challenges, NASA requires a royalty-free license to use the submission, at a minimum.

Some of the challenges on other sites are aimed at techies. On TopCoder, a platform for digital open innovation, for instance, NASA ran a challenge last year to develop an algorithm to detect asteroids in telescope images. There were contests to take the algorithm that resulted and include it in downloadable software for use by amateur astronomer in detecting asteroids.

To avoid security risks, NASA has been careful in what information it request from freelancers, says Rader.  For instance, it only accepts source code--the text interpretation of the code, and uses reviews and scanning techniques to bring the code in house. “We don’t just open up our firewall and let people accept code straight in,”  says Rader.