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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.
If research is publicly funded, the research should be publicly owned.
Then, sue the hell out of anyone using the patents. Hey, it's a proven successful strategy.
PTFY (Privatized That For You)
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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.
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.