C7Studios Recaps the KSP/NASA Panel at SXSW Gaming

Hey, everyone. C7Studios' SXSW recap will be coming in two parts. Here is the first part, covering the panel where members of the KSP team partnere up with members of NASA. Enjoy.

Last Saturday, Felipe and I participated in the “NASA and Kerbal Space Program : The Asteroid Mission in Real and Virtual Worlds†panel at SXSW. We were joined by Jason Kessler, (Program Exec of Grand Challenges), and Jason Townsend (Deputy Social Media Manager) at NASA.

There, audience members got to see an exclusive video that demonstrated the main stages of the Asteroid Redirect Mission in Kerbal Space Program. Starting with the identification of unknown objects, redirection of the asteroid, and finally some research! NASA also presented a video showing the stages of the proposed Asteroid Redirect Mission in real life.

Jason Kessler also spoke about his work with NASA’s Asteroid Grand Challenge. It was really neat to hear him talk about how people can get involved in helping to protect the Earth, by discovering all the Asteroid based threats to human populations. http://www.topcoder.com/asteroids/ Afterwards, Felipe spoke to the crowd about all the work we did in order to support the ARM inside KSP, such as major changes to the joints systems and improvements to the math we use to calculate orbits. I spoke a bit about how we designed the new parts, and implemented “The Claw!†Which will allow you to snag unsuspecting space faring objects, or even hapless Kerbals on EVA.

We also covered the results of the community survey, to see how people have been affected by playing KSP. I was expecting to see that KSP had increased a few people’s interest in aerospace, or that a portion had learned something from playing the game. What I didn’t expect was that these numbers would be so high! Over 97% of respondents stated KSP had increased their interest in Science and Space, as well as 95% had been taught something about Astrophysics or Rocket science they didn’t know before. Both Felipe and I were really glad to see such a positive response from the community. It’s a real validation of the work that we do.

Overall, the panel was a lot of fun, the crowd turnout was great, and it was an absolute honor to share the stage with representatives from NASA. Afterwards we had a great time meeting fans of KSP and talking to them about the game. We gave away a ton of Kerbal stickers as well. I’m looking forward to our next event.