space research technology

NASA spends a lot of time creating technology to accelerate spacecraft, but it also thinks about ways to accelerate technology itself — to bring futuristic concepts into reality. With the Space Technology Research Grants (STRG) program, NASA is engaging academia in the pursuit of exciting, early-stage space technology research through the next generation of space scientists and engineers.

The program’s investments take the form of four types of grants that are announced in annual or biennial solicitations: NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship grants, Early Career Faculty grants, Early Stage Innovations, and the Space Technology Research Institutes. Recipients are selected on the merits and relevance of their projects.

“The objective of the program is to engage the entire spectrum of academic researchers, from graduate students and early-career faculty members to fully tenured faculty,” says STRG program executive Claudia Meyer. “As an organization, we want to tap into this incredible talent base and give everybody in academia opportunities to propose space technology ideas.”

All STRG recipients are paired with research collaborators who provide the NASA perspective and help keep the projects focused on space applications.

“The research collaborator serves as a conduit between the university team and NASA, talking to grant recipients about NASA’s challenges while always on the lookout for opportunities to use the university-developed technology within the Agency,” Meyer says.

All told, the program has awarded more than 539 grants to recipients affiliated with more than 100 universities in 43 states and Puerto Rico. Solicitations are posted in the NASA Solicitation and Proposal Integrated Review and Evaluation System known as NSPIRES

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NASA

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is an independent agency of the U.S. federal government responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and space research. NASA was established NASA is under presidential orders to land humans on Mars by 2033, and NASA-funded engineers are studying a way to build potential human habitats there by producing bricks from pressurized Martian soil. The European Space Agency has a long-term goal to send humans but has not yet built a crewed spacecraft NASA has made use of technologies such as the multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator (MMRTG), which is a type of radioisotope thermoelectric generator used to power spacecraft.[170] Shortages of the required plutonium-238 have curtailed deep space missions since the turn of the millennium.[171] An example of a spacecraft that was not developed because of a shortage of this material was New Horizons 2.[171] The Earth science research program was c...

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