NASA announced it has selected 30 proposals for funding under the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, chosen based on their potential to transform future space missions, enable new capabilities, or significantly alter current approaches to launching, building and operating space systems.

Each proposal will receive approximately $100,000 for one year to advance the innovative space technology concept and help NASA meet operational and future mission requirements.

Proposals include a broad range of imaginative and creative ideas, such as space solar power (SPS-ALPHA: The First Practical Solar Power Satellite via Arbitrarily Large PHased Array), changing the course of dangerous orbital debris, a spacesuit that uses flywheels to stabilize and assist astronauts as they work in microgravity, the use of 3-D printing to create a planetary outpost, low-power microrobotics utilizing biologically inspired energy generation, and multiple innovative propulsion and power concepts needed for future space mission operations, as identified in NASA’s Technology Roadmaps.

“NASA’s early investment and partnership with creative scientists, engineers and citizen inventors from across the nation will pay huge technological dividends and help maintain America’s leadership in the global technology economy,” according to a NASA statement.

NASA solicited visionary, long-term concepts for future technologies for maturation based on their potential value to NASA’s future space missions and operational needs. These first NIAC projects were chosen based on being technically substantiated and very early in development — 10 years or more from mission infusion.

“These innovative concepts have the potential to mature into the transformative capabilities NASA needs to improve our current space mission operations, seeding the technology breakthroughs needed for the challenging space missions in NASA’s future,” said the agency’s Chief Technologist Bobby Braun at NASA Headquarters in Washington.