NASA Crowdsourcing Initiative Gives Employees Chance to Take On the Pandemic

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is bringing back an old crowdsourcing initiative to allow their innovative employees to contribute to solving problems caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The “NASA@Work” initiative has been used previously to gather employee ideas about a problem facing the agency. Since a new initiative launched on April 1 to crowdsource ideas for combatting the coronavirus, over 200 employee ideas have been submitted.

“NASA’s workforce is all about solving problems,” Cathy Mangum, NASA’s deputy associate administrator, said in an interview with Federal News Network. “We have extremely intelligent engineers and passionate people who really wanted to help, and it was truly coming up as almost a rise out of the workforce of, ‘Hey, how can we help?'”

For this “NASA@Work” initiative, Administrator Jim Bridenstine challenged the workforce to focus on providing personal protective equipment, developing new ventilation devices, and using big data to monitor and track the spread of coronavirus.

NASA employees are able to vote and comment on ideas submitted by their colleagues. The roughly 200 ideas have been voted on and commented on by over 4,000 employees already. A NASA leadership team is now reviewing the ideas to determine how the administration can expand and implement them.

For example, NASA is exploring if previously-developed decontamination systems can be used to sanitize everyday surfaces that could be exposed to coronavirus.

“When we’re preparing hardware to go to space it has to be absolutely clean. We don’t want to introduce anything into the destinations we’re going to,” Mangum said. “Over time it’s really evolved. Now we’re looking at how can we decontaminate not only medical masks and the ventilators and things like that, but how can we decontaminate surfaces, so people maybe could feel better about going back to work?”

Mangum told Federal News Network that engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California have designed a new ventilator specifically for coronavirus patients with milder symptoms. The Ventilator Intervention Technology Accessible Locally (VITAL) has already passed testing in New York, and the Food and Drug Administration is reviewing it for emergency-use authorization.

NASA is also working on an oxygen helmet for patients with mild symptoms to mitigate need for full-fledged ventilators, which are in low supply. Another project underway involves the creation of a breathalyzer-type device that can quickly test for COVID-19 itself or antibodies from the disease.

According to Mangum, NASA is working with the Department of Homeland Security, as well as the State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development, and the White House to discuss the ideas and find ways they can collaborate. NASA is also working with its contractors and small business partners on these projects.