NASA Space Apps Challenge 2024 — Galactic Problem Solver

About the challenge

The NASA International Space Apps Challenge is the world’s largest annual global hackathon. It runs simultaneously in cities across many countries over a single weekend. NASA and its partner space agencies publish a set of challenge statements together with open data, and teams build a working answer to one of them within the time available.

Local events send their strongest teams forward for global judging. At that stage, teams can be nominated for one of the global award categories.

The nomination

Our team received the Galactic Problem Solver nomination in the 2024 edition. It is one of the global award nominations given to standout teams, recognising a solution judged to be an elegant answer to the challenge that was chosen.

What the format demands

A hackathon of this shape compresses the whole engineering cycle into roughly two days. The challenge statement has to be read carefully, the scope has to be cut to what can actually be finished, the data has to be understood well enough to use honestly, and the result has to be presentable to judges who did not watch it being built.

Most of the difficulty is in scope control. It is easy to describe an ambitious system and run out of time. The teams that get through are usually the ones that shipped a smaller thing that genuinely works and explained clearly what it does and does not do.

The submission is described in the linked project entry.