NASA, aerospace companies look to crowdsourcing companies like HeroX to tackle problems

In a world where new problems are constantly springing up and companies or agencies are trying to solve them, crowdsourcing companies like XPrize and HeroX provide the necessary platform to tackle all kinds of issues.

For aerospace companies like Lockheed Martin or space agencies like NASA where problems in space arise all the time, having a platform where people around the world can join in to find a better solution is gold, especially as we try to advance our space technology and head deeper into the cosmos.

“HeroX exists for anyone to be able to solve a problem that they care about and work on meaningful work. So it’s a platform and a community for problem-solving and making a difference,” Kyla Jeffrey, Director of Customer Service at HeroX told FLORIDA TODAY.  

Basically, it works like this: A client — let's say NASA — approaches a crowdsourcing company, in this case, it would be HeroX, with a problem it would like to solve. 

From there, HeroX and NASA work together to come up with a challenge so others, whether it's university students or other innovators, can contribute their skill set and come up with a solution. 

A recent example is the animal tracking challenge NASA hosted. Among many of the satellites that NASA has operating in low-Earth orbit, some track animals so scientists can study their behaviors in the hopes that they can craft plans to recover and maintain their populations.

Yet these animal-tracking satellites were meant to be decommissioned and replaced years ago, Jeffrey said. 

Since that hasn't happened yet, NASA came up with the "Next Generation Animal Tracking Ideation Challenge" in 2018 so innovators from around the world could figure out new ways to track animals. 

The two winners — Team Gaia and Team NEMO — came up with different solutions and won $30,000 as a result.

Gaia proposed a high-gain antenna that would dramatically increase bandwidth, coverage and geolocation accuracy. NEMO, on the other hand, proposed a constellation of CubeSats in low-Earth orbit that would improve tracking capabilities of existing satellites.

Another challenge that NASA and HeroX collaborated on was called the "Space Poop Challenge," which had a $30,000 award. 

Back in 2016, the space agency sought out proposals for how to solve the issue of fecal, urine, and menstrual management systems when astronauts are in a spacesuit for a long period of time (about 144 hours or 6 days). 

At the time, astronauts did not have an in-suit waste management system that could solve this issue if for some reason they were forced to be stuck in their spacesuit for days. 

The first-place winner, Thatcher Cardon, a family physician, Air Force officer and flight surgeon came up with the system "MACES Perineal Access & Toileting System (M-PATS)," which entailed hosting a tiny airlock in the suit's crotch, through which items such as catheters and inflatable bedpans could be passed through.

"That was a really great challenge," CEO of HeroX Christian Cotichini told FLORIDA TODAY. "I mean because people get to work on a really massive problem, like a real actual problem."

But how is HeroX different from another popular crowdsourcing company like XPrize?

Unlike XPrize, which awards its own prizes and launches its own challenges, HeroX allows anyone to step onto the company's platform and create their own challenge and prize. 

"So we're more like YouTube, if you will, and they're more like HBO, they produce their own shows, the big big-budget shows, whereas we're really about providing that ability to launch crowdsourcing projects for anybody," Cotichini said. 

Currently, HeroX is working with the Spaceport America Cup, the world's largest intercollegiate rocket engineering competition, which will have over 1,500 students and faculty gather in Southern New Mexico this year to launch solid-, liquid- and hybrid-fuel rockets to target altitudes of 10,000 and 30,000 feet.

Out of the 150 teams chosen, four are from Florida including teams from Florida Tech and the University of Central Florida. 

"We live in interesting times where the rate of innovation, the rate of change in the marketplace has never been faster and it's not going to slow down. The internet, mobile phones, technologies have sped things along and organizations ... are struggling to keep up using their same old approaches," Cotichini said.

"What crowdsourcing lets us do is use the internet to tap into the intelligence of our world to solve these problems. And what's really surprised us is there's a lot of people that want to solve problems."

Contact Jaramillo at 321-242-3668 or antoniaj@floridatoday.com. Follow her on Twitter at @AntoniaJ_11.