NASA iTech Seeks Energy Ideas to Improve Life on Earth, Enhance Space Exploration
WASHINGTON, DC (NASA PR) — NASA iTech and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) are collaborating on a unique iTech competition to identify transformational energy technologies that can improve energy generation, storage and distribution to the benefit of both space exploration and life on Earth.
For the 2018 iTech Energy Cycle, NASA and ARPA-E are seeking to identify the nation’s top entrepreneurs and researchers to present their innovative technologies to address energy-specific challenges. A few examples of technology sub-themes that NASA believes have the potential to improve future space power systems include, but are not limited to:
- Fuel Cells and Regenerative Fuel Cells
- High-energy Density Batteries and Supercapacitors
- Solar Power Systems
- Small Fission Power Systems
- Innovative Power Management and Distribution (including smart grids and wireless power transfer)
- X-Factor Energy: innovations so compelling NASA and ARPA-E should know about them
“Although this is not a typical Cycle, NASA iTech has proven to be a successful public-private partnership model for stimulating the development of groundbreaking technologies, without the government being the early investor,” said Kira Blackwell, NASA iTech program executive in the Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Previous entrants to NASA iTech have already raised more than $50 million in private investment funds.”
Starting today and continuing through April 29, 2018, inventors and entrepreneurs can submit a five-page white paper on their concept on the NASA iTech website. A panel of subject matter experts from NASA and ARPA-E will review ideas submitted and select the top 10 finalists based on their relevance and potential impact.
“The finalists have an opportunity to present their technologies and engage with NASA and ARPA-E subject matter experts, potential investors, and industry partners,” said Blackwell. “NASA is pleased to see an increased interest from the private sector by having Citi facilitate inclusion of a broad range of energy investors and corporate energy experts to assist in the competition process. Citi will also host the final round of coaching and judging at Citi’s global headquarters in New York City from June 11-14.”
“Citi is honored to support NASA iTech with this effort to crowdsource innovative and sustainable energy solutions that solve space exploration challenges as well as energy challenges here on earth,” said Jay Collins, Vice Chairman of Corporate and Investment Banking at Citi.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) at the U.S. Department of Energy provides R&D funding for transformational ideas to create America’s future energy technologies. ARPA-E focuses exclusively on early-stage technologies that could fundamentally change the way we generate, use, and store energy.
NASA iTech is an initiative sponsored by NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate and managed by the National Institute of Aerospace in Hampton, Virginia.
For information about the NASA iTech initiative, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/itech
For information about the Space Technology Mission Directorate, visit:
11 responses to “NASA iTech Seeks Energy Ideas to Improve Life on Earth, Enhance Space Exploration”
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Space Based Solar Power using the heavy lift capabilities of the BFR and New Glenn.
SBSP should be use to replace the numerous bird killing wind turbines developed by NASA and DOE.
“Space Based Solar Power using the heavy lift capabilities of the BFR and New Glenn.”
Sell it first as a way to power things in Space, like a power plant for lunar orbiting ground-penetrating radar to look for lava tubes in which a lunar settlement can be placed. Then use larger ones to power that settlement. Then send them to Mars orbit, for powering Elon’s passengers once they arrive.
Only *then* will they be thought of as a real way to get rid of the bird-killers down here.
Yep, just slide down the demand curve from space uses to Earth based ones.
Of course solar pv doesn’t kill birds and neither do the smallest wind turbines which you can place anywhere, PV can go pretty much anywhere too, likely by the time space based solar power is viable for terrestrial use, we will already be harnessing a significant portion of ambient energy sources and using biogas and waste to energy to handle most of the rest.
Do you mean less that 1000 kW? Yes, they are not a risk. Its the big ones that are doing the damage to birds. I am all for solar PV. Indeed, I think this plan to made roads solar has merit in terms of energy infrastructure.
http://www.solarroadways.co…
SBSP cannot compete economically with Earth based solar power. This point has been thoroughly made, including, most notably, by Elon Musk. Also, in common with wind turbines, global scale solar deployment would be delayed by the limited availability of copper. To further put the prospect of grid scale solar power into a resources perspective, it has been calculated that, for the US alone, the regular replacement of worn out panels (yes, they do degrade over time) would be on the order of 1,230,000 m^2 per day – that’s every day of every year, forever.
Fission using Molten Salt Reactors as a source of heat or electricity is the cheapest, safest, most easily deployable on a large scale, and smallest environmental footprint (caveat: in the absence of a pollution tax, natural gas is currently slightly cheaper in some markets). The sheer energy density of nuclear fission delivers a cost per kWh that no other known technology can match. Note, that the vast majority of the cost of generating electricity (or heat) is capital expenditure, so given the complexity and therefore cost of the machines involved, even fusion is extremely unlikely to be cheaper than fission (caveat: LPP Focus Fusion is the one exception I am aware of – assuming the engineering challenges can be overcome).
Fission is big only good for baseload (which with renewable plus storage we don’t need as much) politics makes it hard to deploy and you need a way to handle waste
Politics, redtape and security also makes it in practice much more expensive when you consider all associated costs including those covered by military
Fission plants can be designed for anywhere from 50MW to as many GW as you like (150-300GW is likely to be the market sweetspot). Molten salt reactors can also load follow, a facility presently only feasible with natural gas.
The Canadian regulator is already processing advanced reactor designs and the NRC has also made public overtures to do something similar. The safety case, and therefore the construction and operating costs, for molten salt reactors are far different from conventional nuclear. Some of these will get built, which will provide a more palatable route to social and political acceptance. Also, China will certainly make extensive use of molten salt technology, which will produce an economic forcing function for the rest of the world. Of course, “renewables” will continue to be deployed, so in the end there will be a mix.
“…makes it in practice much more expensive…”
No it doesn’t. Molten salt reactors will be able to generate electricity cheaper than coal and cheaper than wind, with all costs accounted for, including decommissioning – and that’s before you even think about energy storage systems. Once you add in the energy storage requirement of renewables the cost advantage of advanced nuclear inflates even further.
Most of the “waste” is valuable unspent fuel which can be continuously recycled. The remaining fission products are relatively short-lived and amount to only a few kilograms year per GW. Decommissioning, then disposing of or recycling wind turbines and solar panels will amount to hundreds or thousands of tonnes per GW.
Can yes, but you seem to think the primary function of a nuclear reactor is power generation, in actuality it rarely is, instead the primary function is as deterrent infrastructure
Also politics around them in Canada or France can make them feasible in those countries but not elsewhere like the US. There is also cost to property value, as reactors have a stigma
Edit no amount of explaining what makes your reactor safer will save it from that stigma. Putting a reactor down in the US will cause surrounding property values to plummet. If you add that to the cico of the reactor, they become less and less ideal, the best locations from power distribution standpoint also cause the biggest dip in property value, as such they aren’t as ideal as we thought in the early 70s
Am I the only one who thinks that image is of a death ray beaming down onto the planet?
Small 10MW LFTR reactor would make it possible to provide heat along with electricity, for both the moon and mars. For both places, if these are done in lava tubes, they are ideal.