Community Outreach
The philosophy of democratizing access to space exploration courses through our work and guides both our research platform and our extensive outreach efforts. SEI builds communities that foster open access projects, STEAM outreach programs, and DIY hacker/maker guidelines for spacefaring technologies. The near future of near space will touch the lives of countless Earth citizens, and we want these citizens to play a part in creating and shaping space technologies, whether or not they travel there themselves.
Monthly Roundtables & SEI Showcase
The Space Exploration Initiative facilitates monthly roundtable meetings to engage the MIT community in space based research and hosts an annual showcase to share its capstone projects. In November 2019, SEI’s Showcase in the Media Lab atrium demoed projects from the Zero G Flight, Blue Origin Suborbital Launch, upcoming ISS Mission, and NASA-supported TRISH space health research program.
Sojourner 2020
Sojourner 2020, the first ever international open-call for art in low Earth orbit, successfully launched onboard SpaceX CRS-20 to the International Space Station (ISS) in March 2020. Sojourner 2020 remained onboard the ISS for a 30-day mission before returning to Earth. This collection of 18 artifacts, from nine artist teams around the globe, is one of five payloads launched with the Space Exploration Initiative, in the Nanoracks BlackBox enclosure.
Climate CubeSat Co-Build (C3)
Developed in partnership with MIT AeroAstro and Lincoln Laboratory, C3 is a multitiered outreach platform that aims to enable learning communities — classrooms, cities, and public libraries, nationally and internationally — to gain technical literacy in fundamental principles of climate science, small spacecraft engineering, and data analysis in a highly collaborative setting.
To The Moon To Stay
In the spring of 2020, SEI began a series of “Lunar Lunches,” a set of weekly convenings inviting the broader MIT community to engage with the project, to share compelling and creative ideas to overcome challenges to achieving a sustainable future on the Moon and continue the vision of “off the Earth, for the Earth.”
Workshops & Media Lab “ML Talks”
SEI has hosted a series of special talks and workshops on and off campus on topics including life in space, microgravity design, space health and wellbeing, the ethics of space exploration, and space law. Outside of MIT, SEI has hosted talks and workshops at conferences including SXSW and IAC, and other academic institutions such as Harvard, Yale, NYU, and RISD. In addition to creative, hands-on workshops, the SEI hosts notable guests for a public lecture series with our broader community, including leading space industry executives, scientists, lawyers, and philosophers.