Slashdot Mirror
JPL Begins Commercialization
An anonymous reader writes "JPL has always been concerned with how their work has benefitted society and the Earth as a whole. Everything from developing tools to study what causes El Nino/La Nina to helping find sources of pollution in our environment. In an effort to continue their work while decreasing their burden on NASA's budget, JPL will introduce the JPL Commercialization Center. This means they will begin developing relationships with commercial entities to adapt their technologies for public use. The public benefit is two-fold since licensing fees will help ease NASA and taxpayer burden and life-enchancing technologies will be put into public use."
If JPL can generate some real income, I don't see the boys in DC letting it go for what it was intended. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me to see upper level management at JPL use the extra income to fund pet projects of their own rather that using it as intended. I can only hope that somehow I will be wrong. Be the best mistake of my life! ;)
You must be the change you wish to see in the world - Ghandi
so why would the average slashdot reader care?
I hadn't realized that the JPL was doing weapons research.
Actually, I normally don't cop on spelling errors, since I am not the world's best speller, but I really like this new term and think I shall use it frequently:
Don't disturb Phil while he is in deep hack mode, it is life-enchancing.
7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
Some people may complain that commercializing aspects of the JPL is questionary, but the sad fact is that congress, in its infinite wisdom, does not see fit to provide NASA and JPL with the money they really need. I'm afraid this is probably a necessary move, but perhaps in the end it will be a positive thing.
Personally, I'd like to see NASA as a whole be able to commercialize to some degree to help offset the lack of funding. I'd like to see NASA receive more funding. The money it will cost to pick a fight with Iraq would go a long way at NASA. Hell, it would go a long way to feed a lot of nations, but what can you do other than vote and protest.
Any commercialization of NASA research or technology is a *good thing*. NASA needs to go the route the post office went aka let NASA run like a business, but still be able to receive some funding from the government when it's needed. It's just not working anymore with the current setup (allocate fixed amount of funding every year). If you allow NASA to begin making money then they can further their research and development, they can plan more missions, and maybe just maybe we'll get to mars sometime in our life time.
An added bonus, is maybe we can further kindle the private sector space exploration spark.
Since when is Tang a life-enhancing product?
I swear if I develop cancer it's the Tang's fault.
While I fully support non-profit organizations seeking public money I can't help but feel a bit violated by this.
JPL is one of the last vestigates of "pure" science now that every other institute has sold out for cellular satellites, titties in space, and singings fags on the Space Center.
If JPL sells out to the highest bidder then surely Linus or the GPL is next!
JPL is run by Caltech (a school) for NASA. I doubt that Caltech would be able to sweep that much money under the rug, or divert it for other uses, without massive outcry.
Just because JPL is going commercial doesn't (necessarily) mean that all their decisions will be of the secret star chamber CEO-screws-the-world type. They will be in the public eye more than ever, over precisely these concerns.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Eh. Imagine my surprise when I discovered... I'm a retard.
The Jet Propulsion Lab is part of CalTech. It is decidedly an NGO. My post is completely offtopic. It might not look that way in metamod, so feel free to use "overrated" on it. As cowardly as I would normally consider that move, go ahead.
Anyway, I'm still curious if a government agency is ever allowed to hold a copyright. But that curiousity is offtopic.
I'll go sit down now.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
NASA's budget is less than .5% of the entire federal budget, and JPL is worried about the taxpayer burden they are being??? How completely asinine. Why aren't all the meaningless bureaucratic positions in the Department of Commerce, the Export Import Bank, and all the other do-nothing federal agencies expressing this kind of worry over the taxpayer burden they pose?
At least JPL help keep us at the forefront of various technologies for 40+ years. What has the Department of Commerce ever done for the average American?
Go Lakers!
Well they have their business plan scribled down on a napkin, and they've got 50 programmers in the office ready to code something, and they seem just as good as all the other dot-coms out there that's stock is through the roof, oh wait wait wait, they have linux written on the napkin, this just has to be a winner!!!
Oh wait. . . It's not 1998 anymore?
JPL has always farmed out new technology to private industry. Its our secondary charter just under our NASA work. From what I've read of the press report linked, this just seems to be a re-organization and re-focus of the old Technology Affiliates Program. I've worked primarily for non-NASA reimbursable projects. In the 10 years I've worked at JPL, I've only charged to a NASA number ONCE. And then only for a summer. A reimbursable project is when an outside organinzation pays JPL (through NASA) to do work for for them, and they get something in return, like a research paper, technology, or a piece of hardware. JPL will do the work, and then will get reimbursed by the company at completion, IIRC.
As an example of some of the work either I, or my co-workers have done under the TAP-like programs include things like systems, hardware, and behavior software for autonomous urban robots like Urbie under DARPA. Ford has funded my group to develop hardware for Engine Control, Emission Control, and diagnostics using Neural Networks. 3-Dimensional IC stacks with Irvine Sensors Corporation for novel Neural Network architectures. Quantum Well Infrared Photodetectors (QWIP) imagers by various companies. Active Pixel Sensors (APS, buzword category: CMOS Imagers) has been licenced to private companies like Micron (formerly Photobit, before they were bought by Micron). Our Micro Devices Lab has farmed out a metric buttload of MEMS instruments and sensors to more companies than I can remember.
That said, JPL WILL NOT compete with private industry. We're not allowed to and it doesn't make sense to. We don't do manufuacturing or marketing. JPL does things that no-one else does. Once we figure out how to do something, we give it to someone else and figure out how to do something new. Since we are a Federally Funded Research and Development Center, it is unappropriate for us to steal business away from legitamate business. However it is appropriate for us to be in bleeding edge research areas that are still not financially or strategically desirable for private industry. The Government usually plays anchor tennant to most technolgies.
As a peon looking up, I can see why they've started to emphasize more on reimbursable projects. NASA and Congress is getting more and more fickle on what and when to pay for new projects. The next rover is finishing up soon (The Mars Exploration Rovers, or Mars '03) and work is rolling off. Everyone coming off MER is looking for new jobs and the project that was supposed to pick everyone up (Mars '05) was pushed back to '07. So the scare of layoffs is real amongst us. I'm actually in the same boat since my projects had the misfortune of ending at the same time MER did, so I'm competing with them. (I believe I've got my funding covered, but I'm in the gap at the moment taking vacation). I'm not the only one I know in my situation. If JPL can get more reimbursable projects, I believe JPL can better weather the whims of congress.
I am glad that JPL is re-emphasizing in comercialization. Although Space missions are fun, novel technology is much more satisfying to me. If we can get more industry to fund new technology, I believe the US will be much better off.
--Carlos V.
Kelso: " Man, chicks must love astronauts, it says here they get all the tang they want"
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
So now do we start demanding that all our software be JPLed?
This would be catastrophic! The post office does not have to innovate, there is no profit in long term innovations in the aerospace industry (or execs are too focused on short term goals to acknowledge it...). NASA would eventually become another competitor for Boeing, Lockheed, Pratt & Whitney, and all of the other commercial aerospace companies in the US. Right now the aerospace industry relies on NASA to help them develop products on the distant horizon. They could not work with them nearly as effectively if NASA was out to sell the product themselves...
You don't see UPS and FedEx jumping at the opportunity to work with the USPS do you?
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
Hopefully any JPL commercialization doesn't work out the same way as the space shuttle. When someone pays beaucoup cash to send something up on the shuttle the money goes not back to NASA but instead goes back into the general fund. When someone pays to use the space shuttle Congress uses that cash to give themselves a raise or do whatever else they want. So not only is NASA given an insultingly tight budget but any money they make gets taken away from them.
Hopefully the federal part of JPL's charter won't suck all the cash out of commercialization. JPL has a ton of cool things they could license out to commercial ventures. It'd be a shame if NASA and CalTech don't get to see any of the returns.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
You are correct and it is something not widely known! Actually as I understand it, NASA HQ issues one big contract to Caltech to run JPL for NASA. There are very few NASA government employees at JPL but mostly Caltech employees whose paycheck is issued by Caltech, not NASA. This becomes even more complicated when JPL turns around and issues a subcontract to a 3rd party (i.e. Lockheed) for missions such as Mars Polar Lander etc. as Lockeed reports to Caltech (JPL) which in turn reports to NASA (NASA HQ plus a few bonefide NASA employees on-site to manage the JPL contract). My son, who graduated from Caltech suggested that missions run strictly by Caltech for NASA had a high success rate, but those subcontracted out by JPL to a third parties (i.e. Lockheed) often ran into management communications problems which the NASA inquiry pointed to in the two Mars failures. Hope this clarifies that JPL is not "strictly" NASA. Legally, since JPL (Caltech) is not a government entity but a contractor (just like Boeing or Lockheed) it owns all copyrights and inventions unless it's NASA HQ contract retains such rights for NASA. This is most likely as otherwise this slashdot story from the JPL (Caltech) Press Release would not have been issued in the first place.
What's past is NOT ALWAYS prologue for the future!
Actually, no -- government held patents and copyrights are not public domain.
... maybe your town wasn't quite like my town. Quite like it -- these were stories from Harrisonburg, VA, and VA Tech. But I'm willing to bet that it's not too different from ours. I've seen this kind of thing in too many places.
As much as any real property, they are subject to the Condemnation/Privatization cycle of transferring property from poor people/businesses to wealthy people and businesses.
As I remember, ("Surely you're Joking, Mr. Feynmann) during the Manhatten Project, they asked for and claimed the patent ideas of the scientists working on the projects. So Feynmann, in exchange for a tiny party, provided them with the patents for such things as nuclear powered ships, nuclear subs, nuclear airplanes, and such. Those aren't public domain; and the beneficiary of these patents is the US Government.
Or think back to your own town: remember all those properties that the town council condemned? Remember all those lucrative contracts that went out to companies owned by members of the town council? And the $3000 dead-town-district lots that suddenly got sold as $120k "Parking"? Or the university that traded its valuable property between the university town and the nearest commercial center (on the main road), in an acre-for-acre swap for flood-plane land with its Athletic Director? Or the mayor who got free land from the city for "improving downtown", a free building from the feds for "a medical complex", put his own "doctor's office" on the top floor, and rented the rest to the US Park Service, moving them out of the US Post Office across the street?
Ummm
Anything the government owns is NOT public domain. It is very specifically private domain, and headed into the hands of someone more powerful than you.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
If a private company wants to fund JPL, they're not funding JPL to do it on the cheap. Any work JPL does for them is paid for by them. If anything, they probably get a better workforce per dollar ratio in house than they do funding JPL. All the money that they give us goes through NASA because of the JPL Prime Contract with NASA. Industry pays NASA, NASA takes their cut, pays Caltech, Caltech takes their cut, give it to JPL, and then the standard burden overhead rates apply. We're still pretty good compared to industry for burden rates, but suck for FFRDCs and Universities in general. What industry is paying for is our experience and focus in new technologies. They're hoping we can leverage past work and our skills into a new technology.
Now while I apreciate the Industry funding, I strongly believe that there should be more Government funding for raw new technology research and development. The Government has always been, and will always be an anchor tennant for technologies and that are too far into the future for common industry. Many of the technologies we take for granted today started out as wholly developed or heavily subsidized projects of the US Government. The telecommunications industry, the Internet, high performance computing in general, GPS, and the Airline industry just to name a very short list of things. I strongly believe that we can and should colonize space, however I think it is a big mistake to do it with manned exploration first. Although I don't think JPL will be the only organization to do it, I do think JPL will be and should be the foundation of solar system exploration and travel developments in the future.
"Applied Research" is not the only thing JPL does, but it does do it well. We do have our dreamers that come up with things no one has thought before, those dreamers feed it to our second level visionaries in society that hopefully will have the wisdom to point us in the right direction and tell us (me) what to work on.
There are also things called SBIRs (Small Business Innovative Research, IIRC). They're small, multi-level grants to small buisinesses that each large agency or organization that receives Government funding has to participate in. Grants are given in stages for new technology development.... Paper study, prototype, and so forth up the technology readiness levels. Those I believe are beneficial and allows industry to participate in the bleeding edge. Those are the types of programs are what I think you're talking about and those types of subsidies should continue. Why let the FFRDCs have all the fun. We get stagnant too.
--Carlos V.
Privatizing brings additional risks by bringing in too many people lacking in domain expertise. If enough MBAs get involved, research may disappear altogether from the top ten actual priorities. The late Henry Ford did not get rich from designing new cars, he got rich from mass production of millions of identical cars using one design. This works until there is a new design for a better car, but if you planned ahead the design is by your research program.
Their best chance to stay competitive in Aerospace would be to never go public. The CEO for Ikea goes into great detail about the advantages of not having share holders (even dumber than MBAs) interfering. Also, staying non-profit or not-for-profit ensures that any surplus is reinvested back into the company.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Let NASA commercialize their cutting-edge stuff but for crissake get NASA out of the launching business. Let them deploy probes to other planets, study the Earth and environment, develop advanced interplanetary propulsion concepts, build space habitats, study space medicine - but don't let them anywhere near the drawing board of a launch vehicle. Ground to LEO transport should be off-limits for NASA.
Cargo launch vehicles don't need to be cutting edge. They don't need to be advanced - they need to be dumb, big, reliable andcheap. Crew space taxis need to be ultra-reliable, small and relatively cheap. NASA is apparently incapable of achieving any of these goals.
Subsidizing shuttle payloads has nearly killed the private space industry. Instead of competing with it with tax dollars NASA should promote it by buying launch services.
See this report by Lt. Col. John R. London III to find the historical reasons for the cost of launching and how it can be drastically reduced.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
- No one can afford to get into space because the technology is too expensive.
System after JPL privatization:- No one can afford to get into space because the licensing fees for the technology are too expensive.
At least under the current system, NASA IP immediately enters the public domain. Which is why contests like the X Prize can even get "off the ground", so to speak. With this move, any new tech developed would almost immediately be patented, and you can kiss all your dreams of space goodbye, as the lawyers get involved and we argue for 50 years. What have we gained? New tech, but only for a few people, and that handful of people gets to decide the future of space exploration (or they sue you). Some plan.In a perfect world, I'd take all of NASA private (along with a lot of the rest of the government bloat), but this isn't that world.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.