NASA Future In-Space Operations: NASA Space Portal
NASA FISO Presentation: NASA Space Portal – A Framework for Space Exploration and Development in the 21st Century?
“Now available is the August 17, 2016 NASA Future In-Space Operations (FISO) telecon material. The speaker was Dan Rasky (NASA ARC) who discussed “NASA Space Portal – A Framework for Space Exploration and Development in the 21st Century?”
Note: The audio file and presentation are available online and to download.
The presentation is focused on developing commercial partnerships, but whether this will work depends on how NASA defines a partnership. In recent years that has meant looking for companies that will pay to use NASA facilities, which has had limited success. In the NACA days it meant that industry decided what technology it needed most and NACA paid to develop it.
I’m afraid I found the presentation to be fairly content-free. It has lots of charts showing organizations and activities which could interact, but few concrete details on how they could, would or should interact.
But, in unrelated and more minor news, NASA is doing something along the lines of the NACA model you prefer. They are getting interested in the idea of planetary small spacecraft (which may or may not be CubeSats.) A few weeks ago, they released an AO for concept studies of such spacecraft. The goal, as described at last month’s OPAG meeting, is to identify good, potential ideas for small spacecraft missions and which new technologies would enable or enhance them. This would be used to target NASA technology development work. Small scientific spacecraft aren’t a big part of any budget, but this does seem to be along the lines you suggest.