From my interview with Offscreen Magazine in 2015 which included an awesome photoshoot at the space-communicating Stanford Dish.
First and foremost, I'm looking forward to 2016! It's the year that my book, What's It Like in Space? comes out (available now for pre-order). It's weird, funny and surprising. I'm quite proud of it. What I'm also looking forward to is creating new awesome things in the world – get in touch if you'd like to scheme on making something fun with me.
Now to the clip show. My 2015 was a year well-balanced in new endeavors and maintaining ongoing projects. There are a number of ventures and experiences throughout the year that I found quite delightful.
I built and launched Spaceprob.es, a catalog of the active human-made machines that freckle our solar system, with my friend and long-time collaborator Lisa Ballard.
I celebrated the 50th worldwide Science Hack Day event, a 20+ countries grassroots endeavor to make things with science that I've been tenaciously growing for five years.I traveled to Russia for the first time as a guest of the U.S. Consulate in St. Petersburg and I absolutely loved it.
I was very honored to be invited to give a center-wide talk at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).I walked the halls of Congress for the first time, appealing to staff members for an increase in NASA funding.
I experimented with creating short-and-silly YouTube videos about my favorite space things.
I continued my stint with NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC), a program that nurtures radical, science-fiction-esque ideas that could transform the future of space exploration and aeronautics. Think submarines exploring Titan, propulsion systems that harvest kinetic energy from comets, deep space human hibernation and squid-like rovers on Europa. This year I built niacfellows.org as a helpful guide for how anyone can apply to the program.
I shot a TV thing for the Science Channel (more on that in 2016!).
I designed interfaces and interactions for surgical robots (alas, under NDA).
I took the dive and created a Patreon for people who want to support my work in creating "massively multiplayer science". As someone who has been independent now for over 8 years, it's a fantastic platform for sharing my trials, wins, and sneak peeks of my upcoming projects.
Oh yeah, and I got married! <3