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NASA Squandering Technology Commercialization Opportunities
coondoggie writes "The commercialization of all manner of space technologies has always been a forte of NASA, but the space agency faces a number of economic and internal challenges if that success is to continue. A report by released this week (PDF) by NASA Inspector General Paul Martin that assesses NASA's technology commercialization efforts is highly critical of the space agency's ability to identify and get important technologies out of the lab and out the door to commercial applications."
Because that's why NASA exists after all: to help private investors monetize the products of publicly funded research.
Then, sell the patents. Hey, it's a proven successful strategy.
The purpose of NASA is to spend money, not make it.
If NASA starts selling it software , there is bound to be some troll out there saying they invented it, and sue NASA for copyright infringement.
The point is that NASA scientist are scientist – which means that they are good at basic research, but does not mean they are good a business.
A lot of research institutions throw off start ups left and right (Stanford, MIT) come to mind. They have a staff which is good at providing start up funding and / or marketing the patents.
Politicians like this. Public spending creates small business which creates the jobs of tomorrow.
However, this is kind of hard to do with basic research because it is basic. Principals, once discovered, are universal. Applications take decades to figure out. Everybody likes to say the Moon Shot created the modern chip industry – but it had to take a really crooked path to get from one spot to the next. Ask top scientist back in the 60’s what would turn up and they would not talk about chips – they would talk about iron crystals and wonder drugs.
It’s hard to know what NASA has in storage that has any (or what) value.
$1.00 for ALL of the Space Shuttle technology.
I'll have it shipped to the Energia Baikonur Cosmodrome.
Yours In Soyuz,
Kilgore Trout, Cosmonaut
The issue is that every little thing has to be politically vetted.
Basically I signed up for a semi-external workgroup tasked to develop low cost technology that NASA can use for their planetary study activities. The result was a datalogger and soil analyzer based around old Android phones (which can thus be recycled or bought for cheap on ebay).
This guy G. told everyone that he was the leader of the team that invented the technology (whereas in fact I invented the technology, and he said he'd help me market it to scientists) and went completely ballistic when I called him on it as shown here http://i39.tinypic.com/e7fbsn.jpg . Even after seeing those emails, his supervisor at NASA has not reprimanded him seriously and instead has asked me to play along (he said "I need your technical skills but I also need his political skills"). I don't think so because the US is better than that, but it may have to do with the fact that G. is related to a high ranking government official.
Note that I never accepted G. as the leader of anything, and when we first met to discuss cooperating, I made it clear to him that for me there exist collaborators and customers, not bosses.
Since then I have talked to scientists to arrange demos, etc. and he has been sabotaging the effort by canceling the meetings. Unfortunately he has a security clearance and I don't, which makes it easier for him to go around and tell people things.
When I announced that the system was completed, he sent an email to everyone telling them that I was no longer working on the project... which is true, except it's because the project is finished!
This is not the first time he tries to take credit for the work: in a tech conference he had said things like "It came to me that we could do this or that" when in fact it came to me first and I did something about it. (Link removed, but you can find it in fora.tv)
I since sold a few of these to industrial customers, so the job is definitely done...
At this point my obligations are to:
1) The historical record. As an engineer I must tell the truth and cannot tolerate falsehood in a matter of engineering, as specified in the IEEE Code of Ethics.
2) The project itself. It would reflect badly on my professional reputation if I did not complete it.
3) The team. One of the senior scientists, who is G's direct supervisor, asked me to collaborate. This means I must keep offering opportunities to collaborate whether I like it or not.
My main problem is that I don't understand why people are backing G's stance even after the crazy things he said and wrote! Every time I try to make a logical point as to why I am in the right, I either get no reply (if in email) or I am told things such as "You are technically right" but nothing changes. Is this a cultural thing that I am missing?
I don't want revenge: I even said I would forgive him and we could keep working together if he started pulling his weight and we would do so as equals, but he wants to tell everyone he's the leader and then not do work instead. What is the right thing to do here?
The commercialization of all manner of space technologies has always been a forte of NASA
I'm sure in some alternate universe, this is true. Not here though. NASA's "spinoffs" have always been one of the more bizarre myths of the program. Most such spinoffs are really companies getting paid to do what they intended to do anyway.
I've had the opportunity with a former non profit employer to go looking through NASA research, (sometimes dating back to when NASA was NACA), and a common scenario is someone gets paid for a few years to do something interesting, they write a bunch of papers, and then the whole thing gets deep-sixed while all the staff move on to the next research project. In one case the surviving researcher barely remembered the research because no one asked about it for 40 years!
Meanwhile how seriously does NASA take all this research? They're chucking it from their ever shrinking library at NASA headquarters, for starters.
This thing of turning public funds into research that nobody reads has been going on as long as NASA has existed. That's why I rolled my eyes at the above statement.
Is this a Tragedy of the Anti-Commons situation? I was on a NASA Tech newsletter in the 90's, and it was all-patents-all-the-time. I hope they've improved and are just dumping it out there in the public domain.
I know of a NASA funded project to develop solar plant growth stations for trips to Mars. Since the solar radiation decreases as one gets closer to Mars, the contractor (a for-profit business) engineered a system that collects light with solar concentrators and uses fibers to couple the light to plant growth stations. They even had a plan to separate the spectral components not used by the plants for photovoltaic energy.
The only problem is how to commercialize this technology? We all know that there is a potential market for green plant growth stations, especially in Northern CA and British Columbia. The big problem is that nobody in this company, which relies on government contracts, really wants to be associated with this particular customer base, and the folks at NASA probably feel the same way.
Add another layer of bureaucracy! Doh!
NASA creates a lot of great technology. On our dime. So, it seems like we taxpayers have two competing interests. One, since we paid for it, we should have access at some reasonable cost, perhaps even free. On the other hand, it seems reasonable for the agency involved to at least collect enough in license fees to cover the cost of doing the licensing. After all, it requires work on the part of engineers to package the technology for transfer and to do the documentation, and attorneys and other business development people to negotiate the deal and execute the paperwork. So it seems reasonable to me for the recipients of the technology to, at minimum, cover the cost of executing the technology transfer, and not force taxpayers to cover that cost as well, which is essentially a subsidy to the private industry recipient.
But on to my main point -- the problem is going to be sales and pricing. I am on the board of a small educational non-profit. We were looking for lab and teaching space a while back, and looked at some space at Moffett Field. Since the Navy has moved out, NASA is the largest tenant at Moffett. The Moffett Authority, which is in charge of leasing, is delusional to the point where you keep wanting to ask them: "What planet are you from?". The space they offered was the crap of crap, and they wanted a rent 4X to 5X what better space goes for a half mile away outside the Moffett gates. Couple that with their reputation of being the most restrictive, nit-picky, slow-to-respond, bureaucratic landlord in Sili Valley and it was pretty easy to scratch them off our list.
So if that is any indication of what it is like trying to do business with NASA, where they are not in a customer role but are in the role of providing customer service at a price that provides value -- well, I don't have a lot of hope. Until someone invents a culture transplant operation, I think that having management that is clueless about how private enterprise does business and is delusional about the value of what they bring to the table dooms the concept.
The annual budget of NASA is around $18 billion. For comparison, the annual revenue of WalMart is $421, Toyota is $228 and AT&T is $124 (billion).
The budget of Bell Labs peaked at around $3.6 billion in today's dollars.
NASA claims to generate a ton of innovation which helps to drive the economy. I see no reason not to privatize NASA by running it in the same way as Bell Labs - work on all sorts of stuff, but sometimes direct your focus on useful stuff for both NASA's main mission and economic innovation.
NASA should be self supporting. Whenever they uncover something which would be useful in the marketplace, they should market it and get some return for the effort.
Over time we could slowly wean them away from the government teat, and allow them to be self directed. Instead of wasting gobs of cash on political projects with no good scientific mandate (*cough* space station *cough*), they could choose their own course and focus on things which actual scientists think is useful.
Licensing, patents, renting expertise, products (make and sell satellites), and charging for access to space come immediately to mind. Given the cost of sending a satellite into space, would it really be that hard to take in $18 billion in revenue?
I dunno, I'm probably not taking human nature into account.
Note that NASA's proposed budget for 2012 is $17 Billion and that represents a cut from 2011. You are also low for the cost of the US military, which weighed in at $684 Billion in 2010.
I know that this doesn't impact the point you were making, but if you're going to put down actual numbers you should try to make sure they are at least close to truthful.
Make a grand high tech entrance for the world to see, address the UN, and publish solutions to everything cryptically in a volume called "To Serve Man".
Or they can just patent all the tech under the agency and make a ton of money hiring patent trolls to sue everyone. Then NASA can develop intergalactic space travel in less than ten years...
In the quest to commercialize, NASA is also squandering a lot of opportunities to engage in serious open source development.