Here’s a quick look (in honor of Red Planet Day) at the topics that a variety of startups could master in order to provide help to NASA on their mission to the red planet. It’s a truncated version of a longer write-up I put together last year, with an eye to the current startup community.
Cloud Services
Like plenty of other massive operations reliant on computation, NASA will be investing more on third party cloud services in the near future. The ‘InfiniBand’ is the high-speed network communications link of note, as it allows supercomputing at a 56 Gigabytes-per-second clip in contrast to a 40Gbps Ethernet link. This is the item on this list that is the most applicable to other industry fields, like electronics design, financial services and engineering which are all looking for cloud computing. NASA’s just the only one that needs the cloud in order to reach Mars.
AI
As Roman Stanek, founder and CEO of cloud analytics company GoodData, once put it: As tech keeps improving, humans alone won’t be able to keep up.
Big Data
Data analytics continues to evolve, and the startup community is no stranger to this niche. But big data startups have contenders in the incumbents: Here’s Kenneth Cukier, data editor at The Economist, in a statement given at Comptel’s Nexterday North conference in Helsinki today and reported on by ITPro: Certain mission-critical tasks at NASA will need to rely on crunching massive amounts of data.
Nanotech
Any nanotech startups worth their nano-salt should take a deep dive into the nanotech section of NASA’s massive, multi-PDF roadmap. There, they detail the timelines they have in mind for addressing a variety of mind-boggling experimental inventions. Here’s an explanation of my favorite, the self-healing surface:
Robotics
From the section of NASA’s roadmap dealing with their goals for Robotics and Autonomous Systems: Future generations, if NASA has its way, will send smarter, more agile robots to distant planets, blazing a trail for a potential ground crew, and ultimately furthering the human race. Know any startups who could contribute to the cause? Send them NASA’s way. As humans continue to work and live in space, they will start relying on intelligent and versatile robots to perform mundane activities, freeing human and ground teams to tend to more challenging tasks that call for human cognition and judgment. […] Robots will play a key role in the surveying, observation, extraction, and close examination of planetary surfaces, their natural phenomena, their terrain composition, and their resources. The information they gather will further our understanding of the origins and dynamics of our solar system and expand our knowledge of the universe.” Image: Wikimedia
