NASA Grant App posted

[Billfred]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

Is anyone familiar with how these grants apply to VEX rookie teams? What exactly does it cover, and for what amount?

It appears that the grant covers one event registration regardless of competition chosen.

That said, let me make sure I'm reading this correctly:

Originally Posted by Mark Leon

Each year the Robotics Alliance Project awards hundreds of registration scholarships to school robotic teams across the country. These awards are selected out of hundreds of proposals through an intensive agency wide review process. Last year over 400 registration scholarships were awarded to Teams for BOTBALL, BEST, FIRST, NURC and VEX. NASA will again conduct the Robotics Competition Registration Proposal Process as it has over the past decade. NASA is currently in the process of selecting an organization to address our requirement to inspire students in the arena of medium scale autonomous and remote controlled robotics competitions. NASA's intended outcome with this requirement is to generate a larger and very capable robotics engineering workforce. The Robotics Outreach Competition (ROC) Cooperative Agreement Notice (CAN) has been issued to meet our requirements in this area.

This year the Robotics Competition Registration Proposal Process is designed to select awards for the winner of ROC-CAN. Unfortunately the organization to administer this opportunity has not yet been selected. Your proposal will be ranked with hundreds of other similar proposals. The highest ranking proposals will be given preference for awards. If your proposal is awarded and your proposal falls within the scope of the ROC winner, then your registration cost will be covered for the requested event. If the event is full you may transfer the award to another event inside of the ROC. If your proposal does not fall within the scope of the ROC winner NASA apologizes that we will be unable to award you a scholarship for your requested competition at this time, with one caveat. That caveat being at NASA's discretion we may choose to award registration scholarships for some of the winning proposals. The number and type of proposals that will be awarded will be limited by the scope of NASA's existing procurement mechanisms. If such an opportunity becomes available for you NASA will contact you. NASA will continue to sponsor other complementary robotics competition activities to insure that our future needs can be met.

Let me make sure I've got this straight:

-NASA is soliciting grants for all robotics competitions.
-NASA has not selected an organization to stage the competitions that they will support, but will select one organization.
-If your competition's organization is selected and your grant is approved, you get the money.
-If your competition's organization is not selected, then your grant is not approved...but NASA may still be able to support you depending on their procurement rules.

I'm not saying this is a bad thing--as a taxpayer, I'm glad NASA is examining the best use of its resources--but I'm also trying to make sense of the new language included in this year's announcement.