Starting With Water, NASA's LAUNCH Points Directly Toward Earth

NASA may be known best for outer space, but their newly-formed LAUNCH initiative has the space agency turning its attention to sustainability challenges right here on Earth.

When confronted with a challenge, it's often helpful to achieve some distance from the problem. By taking a few steps back, we're suddenly able to take in a broader and more holistic view of the matter than we can with our noses pressed right up against it. It's perhaps in this spirit that NASA, more commonly thought of as explorers of outer space, is teaming up with other public agencies and members of the private sector as well to address critical challenges that we face right here on Earth.

Through a multitude of missions and an array of satellites, NASA has for years routinely turned their sensors and space cameras back down toward the surface of the planet to gather data and measurements describing environmental conditions and changes in them over time. Putting the knowledge that they have gathered from a distance, and in partnership with the US State Department, USAID, and Nike, NASA has taken the lead in establishing the LAUNCH Sustainability Forum.

Described as "a global initiative to identify and support innovative work that will contribute to a sustainable future" and offering through each forum to sponsor a showcase for "10 innovative, often disruptive world-class ideas" that hold particular promise as pathways toward a sustainable future. The inaugural LAUNCH Sustainability Forum, which wraps up March 18, focuses squarely on water.

Among the roster of the water-related innovations being featured at the inaugural event are technological adaptations that more accurately measure water delivery and pipeline leakage and loss, large-scale vertical hydroponic crop production application that boosts yield, and lower cost bacteriological analytical tools that promise to assist developing nations with accessing the tools needed to monitor and fight infectious, water-borne disease.

Descriptions for all ten of the water innovators selected for participation are available at the LAUNCH.org website, and represent a wide array of different approaches to solving challenges the world faces in ensuring adequate supplies of safe, clean water.

LAUNCH from Geologie on Vimeo.

Photo by NASA via Wikimedia Commons.