Inside NASA’s Space Apps Challenge [video]

Over 2,000 people from 24 cities world-wide took part in NASA’s International Space Apps Challenge, producing over 200 solutions using NASA data sets, over two days at the end of April.

The ‘codeathon’ brought event together citizens who wanted to collectively address critical challenges. The idea is to use minimal resources to compete with other teams around the world, utilizing publicly available space and data to design innovative “solutions” to a pre-determined series of global “challenges.” In NASA’s case this took part across all continents and even in space on the International Space Station.

We stopped by the San Francisco codeathon taking part at Techshop and spoke to astronaut Ron Garan, and Willow Brugh from Geeks Without Bounds – SF’s location lead, about their involvement with the project. You can check out the 200 + solutions here.