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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 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.
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.