The Spring Institute

Spring's Space Hackathon 2025 is here!

This year’s event invites artists, scientists and engineers from around the world to join us in advancing the frontiers of ecosystem engineering, citizen science, and space biospheres. This hackathon is suitable for students and young professionals. With guidance from experts and sponsors, and support from The Spring Institute, you’ll solve the challenge of your choice together with a great team.

This Space Hackathon will feature the following challenges:

The Game of Life - a game about our ecosystem models
Terrascape - building a reference terrarium through citizen science.
Flashmoss - the fastest way to get a biosphere on the moon.

Click below to register and find out more.

How it works

December 2024

Register

January 2025

Get added to our community

Get added to our Space Hackathon community and create a team with fellow participants.

February 2025

Work with your team

Work with your team who will all be in a similar timezone. The deadline to submit your solution is 1 February 2025.

March 2025

Hackathon Day

The shortlisted teams will be invited to Hackathon Day in March for the second round and closing ceremony - this is in person and in respective regions.

Your mission has landed.

The Challenges

The Game of Life
Design a web-based game that follows plant growth and ecosystem models for space.
Challenge Objective:

Design a web-based video game that demonstrates the complexity of expanding life to space. The game should illustrate the challenges and solutions related to building up biodiversity and adapting closed ecosystems to extreme environments. The final product will help raise awareness of these topics.
Who Should Participate:
This challenge is perfect for individuals with a passion for creativity, storytelling, and coding, specifically:
- Artists: Visual storytellers who can bring ecosystems to life through vibrant designs.
- Writers: Storytellers who can weave an inspiring narrative that reflects the ecological and space-based challenges.
- Developers: Programmers who can translate ideas and narratives into an immersive, interactive experience.
The Significance:
Spring is developing various ecosystem models designed for future space habitats. By participating in this challenge, you will contribute to raising awareness about the importance of sustainable ecosystems in space, helping others understand the complexity of life-support systems beyond Earth.
Terrascape
Build a citizen science electronic kit and protocol to monitor terrariums.
Spring is embarking on a grand, global-scale citizen science experiment to understand ecosystem dynamics in closed systems - like a terrarium or a space habitat. Help us fast-track the necessary research in closed ecology!
Challenge Objective: Given a standard terrarium, define a rigorous analysis and data collection protocol using a custom sensor suite you build yourself and any additional observations or measurements you can take without opening the terrarium. Then devise a way to store and visualize this data on the cloud so it can be shared with the rest of the world!
Who Should Participate:
This challenge is designed for individuals who are passionate about the intersection of science, innovation, and space exploration, including:
- Biologists & Environmental Scientists: Experts who understand ecological processes and can contribute valuable insights into the functioning of small, closed ecosystems.
- Citizen Scientists & Makers: Individuals who love to experiment, build, and tinker with ecosystems, and who are eager to contribute to space research from their homes.
- Data Analysts & Engineers: Those skilled in interpreting environmental data and developing the technology to gather and optimize insights from terrariums.
Flashmoss
Imagine the quickest yet ethical way to send and build an enclosed biosphere on the Moon.
Challenge Objective:
Design a roadmap to the Moon to ethically establish a sustainable biosphere on the Moon, regardless of its size. Consider what the biosphere would contain, how it would be transported to the Moon, ensure compliance with planetary protection constraints and how its survival could be ensured for decades.
Who Should Participate:
This challenge is designed for individuals with expertise or interest in:
- Environmental Science & biologists: Specialists who understand ecosystem dynamics and can contribute to creating sustainable models in space.
- Aerospace Engineers: Experts who understand the constraints associated with space, both in terms of environments (radiation, extreme temperatures) but also in terms of operation (mass and energy limits).
- Operations specialists and Managers: People capable of building credible timelines, identify supplier, size teams and budgets.
- Legal experts and Ethicists: Experts who can look at the shortcomings of the mission from an ethics point of view and build strong argumentation for it.
Why it matters:
Spring wants life to go to the Moon, but it's important to get there in the right way. By designing quick missions that are aligned with existing timelines from other space players, you will pave the way to realistic concepts that will prelude Spring's Forest on the Moon.