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30th Anniversary of The Planetary Society
  

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Carl Sagan Fund for the Future

Carl Sagan Fund for the Future Make a Donation

Carl Sagan was Earth's leading advocate for the greatest adventure in human history: missions of discovery to worlds beyond our own.

The Planetary Society's Carl Sagan Fund for the Future helps keep Sagan's legacy alive by providing seed money for brilliant high-risk/high-reward ideas.

The Sagan Fund allows us to pursue innovative ideas to advance us farther, faster, and more creatively into space. New propulsion systems, more sensitive detectors, elegant experiments -- we expect all this and more.

Thanks to support from our Members, imaginative researchers with great ideas won't run into a brick wall; they'll move forward with the backing they need, at the moment they need it.

Why now?


NASA has been forced to kill both of its programs that funded risky-but-promising new ideas. The NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts was zeroed out two years ago, along with Red Planet Capital, a fund focused on innovations in space. This is on top of 50 percent cuts to NASA's advanced technology budget!

These catastrophic developments are seriously bad news for every space advocate. Our space programs are on track to become more impoverished—starved of groundbreaking new ideas and of a generation of brilliant innovators who will turn to other fields.

Our goal with the Sagan Fund is to fill this void and help turn possibilities into realities.

Who will select the projects?


In order to best find and evaluate the potential of worthy innovative projects, the Sagan Fund will be managed by The Planetary Society's Board of Directors, aided by an esteemed New Ventures Committee.

The New Ventures Committee is made up of space experts from every corner of the science and engineering communities—the best of the best—to ensure that every idea we back has the appropriate balance between radical far-sightedness on one hand, and rock-solid science on the other.

What types of projects?


With the assistance of the New Ventures Committee and our Board of Directors, we plan to seed fund new work in areas from propulsion to scientific mysteries, to better ways to gather Earth climate data, to new planetary exploration techniques.

To find the best ideas, we will solicit proposals from researchers, scientists, and smart amateurs throughout the world. The best of the proposed projects will be included in the fund based upon the quality of the proposals and funding available.

The Sagan Fund will do things that seemed impossible a few years ago, like applying nano-technology to exploration. Imagine miniaturized spacecraft and devices like micro-rovers deployed by the score during a single mission to Mars, or micro-satellites and micro- solar sails...

Other projects might confront scientific mysteries and anomalies, figure out better ways to gather Earth climate data and design intriguing new planetary exploration techniques.