OSMED Innovation Summit 2027

Human spaceflight cannot be designed by one discipline alone. OSMED and the University of Central Florida jointly present this Innovation Summit from January 8-10, 2027. This summit is focused on communication across all the disciplines that are important to advancing human spaceflight. The communication vehicle for this conference comes from the Engineering discipline - Requirements. Human spaceflight takes the efforts of many different types of experts, but engineers continue to play a central role in moving ideas from the drawing board to real-world spacecraft, space suits, habitats, tools, countermeasures, sensors and more. How do they understand what experts in other disciplines need and want? Through a multilayered process many experts outside of engineering may never have heard of - developing, writing, and integrating requirements. Writing requirements is both an art and a science, and is a central part of how customers communicate with engineers in precise ways. In a field as demanding as human spaceflight, precision in communication is critical to success. If you want to move an idea from your brain to the drawing board and eventually into a real piece of hardware or software, you have to understand how requirements work and how they have driven human spaceflight. Every company that is developing a product, whether it is a coffee cup or a space habitat, ultimately speaks in the language of requirements. During Day 1 and 2 of the summit participants will alternate between short talks by experts and small group breakout sessions where you will step through the process of describing what you need to achieve and writing the corresponding requirements, while learning the pitfalls of this deceptively complex process. A central goal of the workshop is teaching a wide variety of experts how to communicate their ideas to engineers and applying them to the systems development processes effectively.