Space for Good: Special Report – June 2021
Contests and Hackathons
Contests
and competitions such as hackathons are commonly used in the space sector to stimulate innovation and support the formation of start-up companies. These continued in 2020, but some were repurposed and others set up specifically to address pandemic-related challenges.
Within weeks of lockdowns starting in Europe, ESA launched a special
Also in April, more than 12,000 people from over 100 countries took part in
edition of its Sentinel Hub Custom Script Contest in coordination with
the Hack the Crisis hackathon for start-ups, organized by Garage48 and
the EC, focussing on the crisis, with a range of Euro Data Cube tools
supported by ESA’s Business Incubation Centre (ESA BIC) in Estonia. The
made available. The quality of entries was so high that two of the ideas were
winning project was designed by Suncrafter, a German start-up, which
eventually integrated into the European RACE portal (see Data
designed an ultraviolet unit to disinfect hands that was to be built using
Dashboards).
repurposed solar cells.
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