Quantly 2018 Astropreneurship Hackathon

A few good friends of mine are especially passionate about both space travel and Russian films. These two subjects happen to coincide in Solaris (1972), where a team of cosmonauts is faced with existential crises above the cryptic planet of Solaris. Having recently watched this film together, all of our talk since had been about the advent of human space travel and its philosophical/ethical implications. These conversations eventually came to a head after a few post-midnight birthday party toasts, where we all but exhausted our lines of questioning and agreed we’d become astronauts in the next life.

Not wanting to let the topic go, the most existential friend shared a link to a space-themed hackathon and asked that I roll the dice. The alarm went off six times that morning but, four coffees later, I eventually met software engineers Alex and Frank to form Team Micro. This is what we came up with for the Quantly 2018 Astropreneurship, Space Medicine and DataVerse Hackathon at Harvard University:

We designed and demoed a biofeedback device that uses LiDAR and EEG to improve localization and orientation in microgravity environments.

Our project tied for first with the only other project being demoed: Deep Space Pulsar Navigation System (DSPNS), which can be found here.