Making Asteroid Exploration Hardware More Openly Available (Update)
Keith’s note: My question to the 1:00 pm Asteroid mission media telecon: “There is a lot of talk these days from NASA about the collection and utilization of resources in the solar system – indeed, the recently signed #Artemis Accords specifically deal with this issue with regard to the Moon, Mars, Asteroids, and comets. Is the OSIRIS-Rex sample collection system open source – can other space agencies or companies use this technology? Is it being considered for use on other missions? Same question about the Lucy, Psyche and DART systems.”
With regard to OSIRIS-Rex Lori Glaz said that NASA needs to check. Regarding the Psyche mission Lindy Elkins-Tanton said that it is being done via a partnership with Maxnar who was selected because they have a lot of experience over a hundred spacecraft. The hope is that the design of the mission will be available to future missions. Regarding Lucy, Hal Levison said that a lot of the hardware is proprietary to Lockheed Martin and is based on flown hardware to reduce costs. No mention was made regarding DART technology.
Keith’s update: At the 3:00 pm briefing I re-asked the question of SMD AA Thomas Zurbuchen adding: “NASA is going to do something that it has never done before with applicability to many future missions and activities in space – things that have been called out in the Artemis Accords. Many of the missions you are sending out are technology demonstrators. If you are sending a thing to a world with the specific task of demonstrating a way to do something new on that world, then the results – and the way you got them – are of equal importance – and the Artemis Accords would seem to want you to make a lot of that information accessible. Is NASA going to make OSIRIS-Rex technology available in an open source fashion for other agencies – and perhaps companies – to use? I know there is a difference between scientific results and engineering performance and that there are always ITAR issues. How is the dissemination of this new technology going to evolve?”
He replied: “We have been a leader internationally in making things public. We are also making our models public. We believe in the dissemination of science since that speeds up discovery and also broadens it. We think that doing so inspires people to figure out things to do with our science in ways that we would have never thought to do. There were multiple solutions to the technology needed for this mission. In this case the arm was developed by a Lockheed Martin employee – so according to U.S. law the company owns that invention. I talked to Lockheed Martin and asked what they’d do if someone was interested in the design and they said to come on in since they are interested in spreading this technology. There are many different avenues to take regarding intellectual property (IP). IP is an important ingredient of pharmaceutical discovery. If we want to encourage the speed of discovery then we need a IP model that adapts to way that this actually works. Success for us at NASA is not just that the mission is successful. We want any company that can use the technology that we have developed to enhance business base to create more jobs around the country. In that regard I think we are consistent with the Artemis Accords.”
It should be treated the same as any other NASA technology. If NASA owns the IP than make it available as long as ITAR is followed. If it belongs to a private firm than it is their IP.
There are, naturally, grey areas. A NASA system on a spacecraft built by a private company is going to have some details regarding the spacecraft interface and accommodations which can’t be made available. Doing so could reveal proprietary information about the spacecraft. Also, there things like systems designed by JPL. Are they NASA intellectual proprietary (since JPL is a NASA institution) or Cal Tech’s (since Cal Tech operates JPL for NASA.) That would be specified in the contract, and I don’t mean to single JPL out since the issue applies to all hardware NASA contracts out to other institutions. But the contracts are written with ownership of intellectual property in mind. Perhaps a better question is whether or not NASA should make it a policy to limit the intellectual property paid for by NASA but owned by someone else.
It’s my understanding, and perhaps with your experience you could provide insight on this, one of the incentives of a NASA contract is the contractor keeping ownership of the IP. It’s one way to encourage the more innovative firms to bid
That’s correct. I can only speak for scientific instruments, but there is definitely a desire to keep some aspects of the design proprietary and NASA does accommodate that. There is an expectation (actually, a de facto requirement) to publish a paper describing the instrument, but not the blueprints or even all of the important details. (For example, the paper describing the Galileo mission’s Plasma Spectrometer has been described as mushroom farming, if you’re familiar with that term.)
But the incentive is primarily about future NASA contracts. Keeping that intellectual property means you can use NASA funding to improve your own technology and capabilities. If it’s proprietary, you will have a competitive edge over everyone else on the next occasion NASA asks for proposals for similar hardware. So, yes, if NASA required institutions to make the details public, it could discourage people from proposing. But it could also help small, innovative firms, by reducing the advantage which older institutions have, with experience and intellectual property acquired from past, NASA-funded work.
The whole thing is a balance, so I guess I’d restate the question (again) to being whether or not NASA is currently striking the right balance. I’m not sure about the answer, but I think it might be on the side of allowing the contractors to keep a little bit less intellectual property. Not none, but a little bit less.
On a more positive Osiris-Rex related note, NASA did finally use the “A” word in their post when discussing the probe and its place in their current slate of asteroid missions:
https://www.nasa.gov/featur…
(You will have to scroll to the bottom.)
Indeed they did!
In the age of China stealing all of our tech, why in the heck should we be MORE open and transparent???