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Business & Tech

Aiming for Space: CASIS Manages ISS Experiments

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Fort Mason’s century old Festival Pavilion was the perfect setting for Engadget’s inaugural Expand show in San Francisco last weekend. The old building with its steel bones showed off 21st century drones, electric cars, and the latest in electronic gadgets that literally made participants say ”wow!” out loud.

Some of the products are already on the market, while plenty of entrepreneurs wandered the show floor making new contacts and getting advice about crowd sourcing.

Space Station Experiments

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Now that NASA has retired the space shuttle, it’s selected the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS) to be the sole manager of the International Space Station U.S. National Laboratory.

CASIS Communications Manager Patrick O’Neill manned a booth at Expand, handing out mission patches and explaining to attendees that SpaceX will be used to blast experiments into orbit.

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O’Neill encouraged entrepreneurs to apply for grants to fund research in space. “We can hook you up with angel investors who can get that research funded.”  

Engadget Expand

Engadget is an online magazine focused on happenings in the world of technology, gadgets and consumer electronics. Engadget Expand featured speakers, cool tech stuff and a competition, Insert Coin, for $20,000 in startup funds for new ideas.

Several companies displaying their products were focused on reducing energy consumption—Nest of Palo Alto, and Insert Coin challengers Radiator Labs and Observos.

Another amazing product was Ziphius, an aquatic drone controlled by smartphone or tablet. Ziphius’ inventors came all the way from Portugal to show their product. Other long-distance commuters included Scubo 3D from Spain and an entry from Manitoba.

ZSpace of Sunnyvale bowled-over attendees with its revolutionary 3-D product that allows you to pick-up and manipulate objects, via a stylus, on a computer screen. Whether a patient’s own heart, a product design, a mutated gene or architectural plans, the uses for this product are astounding. To make it even cooler, it has a “camera” that you can fly through the objects, seeing them from the inside.

Engadget Expand’s sponsors all had extensive displays of their latest products, including Lenovo, Outlook and Toyota.

Editor’s Note: Engadget and Patch are both owned by AOL.

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