Volume 4, Number 2    May/June 1996

Advanced Technologies

Great Ideas Could End up in Space

NASA has selected eight innovative advanced space concept proposals to begin cooperative agreement negotiations as part of the Advanced Concepts Research Projects (ACRP) Program.

The ACRP Program was established in an effort to identify and define new, advanced concepts and technologies that have the potential to greatly improve future U.S. space endeavors. It is planned that the ACRP solicitation will fund approximately eight projects a year. Each will be headed by a principal investigator and funded at a maximum dollar amount of $250,000 within a 24-month period.

The first ACRP solicitation was released in September 1995. As a result, more than 100 proposals covering a wide range of innovative concepts and space technologies were received.

Each proposal was evaluated by NASA on the basis of how well it met the primary goal of the solicitation -to identify, develop and advance new, far-reaching concepts for space systems and system elements that may later be developed in advanced technology programs. The selected proposals encompass innovative and potentially significant concepts ranging from fusion-based space propulsion and interplanetary navigation to optical computing and robotics.

Each project's principal investigator is designated as an "ACRP Fellow." Their main focus will be on the proposed concept and technology of their proposal, but they will also function as a member of a broad, interdisciplinary team. This team allows the Fellows and NASA researchers to interact and work together by participating in workshops, periodic meetings and experimenting with different infrastructures using the Internet. The second ACRP Program solicitation is scheduled to be released Summer 1996.

The ACRP Program is sponsored by the Advanced Concepts Office, Office of Space Access and Technology, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC. Additional information on ACRP and other NASA Advanced Concepts Office activities can be found via the Internet: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/acrp/oac.html

1995 SELECTED ACRP PROJECTS

Advanced Inflatable Structures for Aerospace Dr. John A. Main, PI University of Maine, Orono, ME Advanced Spacecraft Architectural Concepts Dr. David W. Miller, PI Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA Application of Dynamical Systems Theory to the Design and Development of Spacecraft Trajectories Prof. Kathleen C. Howell, PI Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN Field Reversed Configuration Start-up Relevant to Fusion Propulsion Dr. Allen L. Hoffman, PI University of Washington, Seattle, WA Fractal-Branching Ultra-Dexterous Robots Dr. Hans Moravec, PI Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA High Performance Piezoelectric Thin Films for Shape Control in Large InflatableStructures Dr. Ratnakar R. Neurgaonkar, PI Rockwell International Science Center, Thousands Oaks, CA Mars In-Situ Resource Utilization Research Dr. Robert Zubrin, PI Boulder Center for Science and Policy, Boulder, CO Smart Optical Random Access Memory for Fast Information Management and Analysis Dr. Hu-Kuang Liu, PI University of South Alabama, Mobile, AL

For more information, contact John Mankins at NASA Headquarters. Phone: 202/358-4660, E-mail: jmankins@osat.hq.nasa.gov Please mention that you read about it in Innovation.