Space for hire

Harangued by the US media as being a wasteful and bloated organisation, NASA is criticised for being weighed down by its own bureaucracy.

This might seem unfair considering its many successes over the years but despite its $17bn (£8.5bn) budget NASA has recently been forced to close programmes such as its Advanced Concepts team and a number of other science projects, including the Lunar Robotic Precursor Programme to fund its space flight priorities.

Meanwhile, its smaller commercial rivals such as Virgin Galactic and SpaceX are pressing ahead with plans for private space flight on comparatively tiny budgets. Over the past two years these meaner, leaner and more dynamic space companies, and SpaceDev and Blue Origin, have been developing technology and spacecraft in half the time and for many fewer dollars than NASA’s.

Perhaps realising it is missing out on so much innovation, NASA has changed tack over the past 18 months. It is increasingly keen to team up with other commercial big-hitters in the industry and build non-traditional alliances with companies from outside the space community. This new way of working is part of its increasing desire to ‘democratise’ space.

It is a direct result of the US’s Vision of Space Exploration — an ambitious long-term document that details its highly-ambitious plans in space over the next 20 years.

Originally announced by George Bush at NASA headquarters in 2004, it covers everything from the replacement for the Shuttle to robotic interplanetary missions and includes the space agency’s plans for returning to the Moon by 2020. Its implementation has already begun but for NASA, the future of space exploration is not something it can do alone — it will need help.

Pete Worden, director of NASA’s AMES Research Centre, is one of the key people in charge of developing these partnerships.

‘As a species we are now moving out to expand across the solar system,’ said Worden. ‘To do that we need more than just rockets and space missions. One of the primary precepts of this vision is to expand private sector opportunities and involve them — something that is just as important as rockets.’

There are two key factors in this new policy. As well as further developing its relationships with traditional aerospace firms, NASA is also looking to team up with a number of companies that operate in areas such as IT, biotechnology and nanotechnology as well as a selection of other interesting non-traditional firms.

‘The key thing is really to look at making partnerships with people who operate in areas that are not typical NASA areas,’ said Worden.

NASA’s alliance with Google, signed in late 2005, is the most mature of these. Its existence owes as much to geography as to executive decision-making, something that characterises a number of the agency’s recent partnerships. Nestled in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, AMES Research Centre is surrounded by the brightest and best in technical innovation, a fact that NASA has finally decided to exploit.

In a spirit of good neighbourliness, NASA has agreed to lease Google about one million sq ft of its extensive land, which Google plans to move into by 2009. However, the cornerstone of their partnership is the way they will work together to produce new image applications for the public.

Worden was unable to go into specifics on the deal but did say NASA is looking to use Google’s ‘Google Earth’ platform and combine it with the huge amounts of climate change data such as sea temperatures and atmospheric measurements that NASA has compiled over the years.

‘The idea is that using Google’s ability to display huge datasets will help provide the kind of tool that scientists can use, as well as the general public, to view climate change data over the past 10 years, for example,’ he said.

‘Google is in the business of organising and presenting data, and NASA has a lot . It’s a partnership that is really quite logical.’