JPL, one of 10 centers, works on a small fraction of NASA's budget. The manned space program is much larger, and the huge Earth science program run out of the Goddard center is also very large. Of course, the point of robotic space exploration (JPL's specialty) is to provide low-cost solutions for scientific discovery.
I've been informed by the comm. office at JPL that it is ok to make our software open source. The truth is that almost all of our research is published. Anyone working under a govt. grant, currently including many university grad. students can get licenses for our software, including source code.
If you want the technology, develop it yourself--all the information is out there. JPL doesn't get paid to wrap it up nicely for you (unless the employee wants to, and JPL gets something out of it).
Disclaimer: sleep deprived employee doesn't represent views of JPL.
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JPL, one of 10 centers, works on a small fraction of NASA's budget. The manned space program is much larger, and the huge Earth science program run out of the Goddard center is also very large. Of course, the point of robotic space exploration (JPL's specialty) is to provide low-cost solutions for scientific discovery.
I've been informed by the comm. office at JPL that it is ok to make our software open source. The truth is that almost all of our research is published. Anyone working under a govt. grant, currently including many university grad. students can get licenses for our software, including source code.
If you want the technology, develop it yourself--all the information is out there. JPL doesn't get paid to wrap it up nicely for you (unless the employee wants to, and JPL gets something out of it).
Disclaimer: sleep deprived employee doesn't represent views of JPL.