User:Pwooster/NACA lessons for NASA

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The following was put together in response to a request from someone in a NASA technology / commercialization organization regarding how to make NASA "more like the NACA", meaning focused more on developing technologies and passing them along to the commercial sector for utilization. A number of topics of relevance to DevelopSpace are discussed in this response.

In summary, the topics are:

  1. Pursue collaborative development and share designs, methodologies, tools, and results in an open-source manner
  2. Have an intended path for the technology (or, alternatively, for the development of new / alternative markets)
  3. Promote employee engagement in independent projects

These are described in more detail below.

pwooster 23:59, 7 November 2010 (UTC)


1) Pursue collaborative development and share designs, methodologies, tools, and results in an open-source manner

This topic is relevant to your “Treat Industry (Broadly) as the Customer” rule, although could potentially be a rule unto itself. There have obviously been vast advances since the time of the NACA in the ability to openly and interactively share information amongst a large set of people and organizations, and for those entities to directly incorporate such information into their own activities. While the NACA was able to share results through published reports, the potential now exists for much more extensive openness in the development process and for the ability of those outside NASA to leverage the work conducted by NASA.

Open-source development, wherein software source code is licensed in such a way that others are free to use, modify, and redistribute the code, has had a major impact in the software world, where it has both reduced cost and increased the quality of software. Applying these same concepts to NASA’s activities can have significant rewards in terms of speeding the development and adoption of new technologies, and enabling broader participation in NASA’s technical endeavors.

Beyond simply sharing results, this would involve sharing all information related to the design and development of a system or technology, such that a potential user can more readily pick up that material and move forward with the implementation of their own system incorporating such elements. This could include software source code, mechanical designs, electrical designs, test procedures, raw test data in a machine readable form, observations and anomaly investigations, and so on. All of this information should be licensed (or released into the public domain), such that others can use, modify, and redistribute the information (and embodiments thereof) in their own activities. Applying open-source principles to the space arena is something which I’ve been quite interested in for some time, due to the significant benefits I believe it offers. Along with a group of others, I’ve created a non-profit organization dedicated to doing just that. I’ve attached a paper some of us put together outlining some of these concepts.

As the major funder of technology development in this area, NASA is uniquely positioned to make a significant shift in how these aerospace research activities are undertaken. This could involving mandating, or at the least encouraging and rewarding, the open licensing and sharing of information from NASA research and development, as well as supporting the development of platforms which will enable this sort of development to be wide-spread both within NASA as well as across the wider aerospace research community (including industry and academia). Beyond speeding the adoption of technologies external to NASA, fostering such an open, collaborative environment would also encourage and facilitate external contributions to NASA projects.

2) Have an intended path for the technology (or, alternatively, for the development of new / alternative markets)

In the realm of treating industry as the customer, I think it is also useful to also make sure that a clear direction exists for where NASA wants industry to be heading as well. The idea behind this is to make sure that you are not just catering to the industry serving existing markets, but looking ahead to where the market will be in the future. This is particularly important given the current state of the aerospace industry, which is characterized by a small number of large, entrenched interests, which may not have much incentive to substantially change the status quo.

When I’ve typically heard people say “NASA should be more like the NACA”, it is frequently in reference to Earth to LEO transportation. In this realm, the intent is to have NASA develop technologies that will greatly reduce the cost and possibly lead to certain particular capabilities such as single-stage to orbit and fully-reusable launch vehicles. While reducing launch costs is a worthy goal, this area is really within the realm of an existing market, or the natural expansion of an existing market.

There are also additional technology areas, which wouldn’t be of much interest to the current industrial interests serving existing markets. In the context of the exploration of space, this would involve areas such as deep-space human transportation services (i.e., for missions to NEOs), delivery of large payloads to the surface of Mars, and deep-space high-bandwidth communication, to name a few potentially new market areas.

Overall, I think this approach ties in well with the NACA’s mission “to promote military and civilian aviation through applied research that looked beyond current needs.”

3) Promote employee engagement in independent projects

The NACA Wikipedia article you linked says: “In addition to formal assignments, staff were encouraged to pursue unauthorized ‘bootleg’ research, provided that it was not too exotic.” This sounds similar to Google’s “20% time” policy, wherein engineers can spend one day a week on projects that aren’t necessarily part of their everyday job. Similar policies exist at a number of other companies.

While it wouldn’t necessarily need to be 20% of their time, encouraging researchers to spend a portion of their time working on independent projects could be quite valuable. This would allow them to explore avenues they wouldn’t otherwise be able to, and could enable the exploration of potentially disruptive technologies.

Such a policy would fit in well with your “no picking winners” rule, and also aid in portfolio diversification. Having a truly open-source, collaborative development environment such as described above could also tie in with this by allowing researchers from elsewhere in the agency to contribute to a project they are not formally involved in, as well as facilitating the development of independent projects with a variety of contributes from across the agency and external to it.