House Hearing on NASA Technology
“The purpose of this hearing will be to examine the direct economic and societal benefits that investments in NASA have generated and highlight those areas where continued investments could help stimulate the pipeline for future economic growth.”
– Democrats Highlight Importance of the Nation’s Investments in NASA that Strengthen the American Economy, and Improve Our Daily Lives
– Beyond Tang and Teflon: Witnesses Highlight NASA-Derived Technologies that Save Lives and Fuel Economic Growth
– Hearing Charter
– S&A Subcommitte Chairman Steven Palazzo (R-MS)
– Mason Peck, Chief Technologist, NASA
– George Beck, Impact Instrumentation, Inc.
– Brian Russell, Zephyr Technology
– John Vilja, Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne
– Richard Aubrecht, Moog Inc.
Sing it everybody. More money!
Homeland Security’s R&D budget went up 31% ??!! At least there is 1.2% R&D increase overall.
Cool, PWR used it’s SSME experience to “make clean energy gasification technology with 10-20 percent lower capital costs and a 10-percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, compared to conventional technology”. Well done.
One benefit is the increased ease and lower cost of space operations by using NASA’s open source, free mission ops software, Open Mission Control Technologies. A couple weeks ago we started a blog with news about recent releases. Search the internet for “openmct blog”
Another study for the government and politicians to stymie operations of NASA. The agency should be turned over to the private sector and let it handle the REAL mission and that’s Space Exploration.
Yeah, let’s turn it over to the private sector. Of course we shouldn’t spend a dime on funding them. Let’s call that Plan A.
Plan B should be a reasoned approach that looks at actual accomplishment and send a half cent on the dollar to do things in an ordered way to push mankind into space.
The problem with the private sector is that it always has it’s hand out for public money. Then it’s business model counts on public money to finance it’s ongoing operations. You have to be realistic. There is no commercially acceptable business case for space exploration outside of pure speculation. You don’t know what you’ll find and you can’t predict what commercial value you’ll get from what you find (which you don’t know). This is Business 101.
The government needs to take the lead in exploration given it’s uncertain financial outcome. People just promising good things shouldn’t be given public money just for promising the un-promissable.
We, as a nation, need to get a grip and realize that there is no certain pay-off from exploration. That said, there is a certain pay-off from those technologies that enable us to visit deeper into the solar system. This is, and always has been, the role of government investment. We need to continue investing to go forward even though we can’t quantify what we find when we get there.
TS,
You’ve hit the nail squarely on the head. Unless somebody comes out with a viable new model, it has to be both government and private sector, each doing the parts that makes sense, and with a lot less overlap than we’ve had to date. Any overlap should be strictly in the private sector, where it helps drive down prices, but NASA doing things that the private sector is doing (and doing faster and cheaper), is pure waste. It’s too bad that this simple concept is beyond the capability of Congress people to understand.
Steve
Generally I agree with your comments Trainwreck.
I wish there would be a name change for Space Exploration. The term “exploration” smacks like the visual of a gaggle of explorers wandering aimlessly through the galaxy. Is there a more substantive term? Space Advancement? Frontier Expansion? Civilization Extension? Someone in the bleachers, suggest a term or phrase that has a more potent purpose than just wandering around the solar system at great expense.
I think there is a ‘business case’ for what I’ll call Space Advancement. The bad news is, the effort is at Technology Level 1 and the Technology Level 9 that closes the business case is over a light-year away from Level 1 on the value stream.
There are numerous technology pursuits that have eventual commercial substance, but the road from here to their market viability is long. Solar power SBSP, lunar or Mars habitation, asteroid utilization and threat mitigation, etc. Business risk is huge with all of these, currently. A problem I’ve seen with most of the plans that champion these pursuits is that they emphasize the technical and fail dramatically on the financial, economic and risk analysis constructs. Consequently, the private sector laughs and walks away.
Two things need to happen. One, the private sector on the right end of the value stream needs to be educated regarding the long term gains and why they are powerful and worthy of pursuit and then they need to learn how move more to the left. Two, the government has a special role in that it is free from the imperative to create instant value and that it has the ability to fund long term high-risk activities, ones the private sector will simply not perform.
Too much, the government falls into a mode where they pursue a program, move to a technology development level (TRL 3) and then simply stop. They write a report and that’s it. Now and then they are puzzled as to why the private sector has ignored their technology development. They conclude they’ve done their job the moment they place their technology products out on the public doorstep.
Government needs to be taught how to move from the TRL 1 left toward the, private sector) TRL 9. The gap in the U.S., between TRL 3 and TRL is killing this nation. And as many know, the “Valley of Death” in between must be elminated if we are to succeed.
That other nations, such as China, have a fundamentally different government and commercial sector architecture is a message, a clear and present danger to the United States. In some of those nations government and industry are nearly one in the same and from that they do not suffer the same Valley of Death circumstances we face. Who is working on the Valley of Death issues today? No one as far as I’ve seen.
on trl advances..
The problem is that you can get from TRL 0, to 1, to 2, to 3 for small money.. a few hundred k. But getting from TRL 3 to 6 is serious money (millions). Demonstrating the idea on the bench (TRL 3) is cheap because you haven’t brought in all the infrastructure of mission assurance, manufacturing, etc. You keep your records in a lab notebook, typically, there’s just a couple or three people involved in the work, so you don’t spend a lot of time in meetings, etc.
Getting to an honest trl 6 (demonstrated in a relevant environment) means thermal vacuum chambers, vibe, class S parts, repeatable procedures, etc. and that stuff costs a lot to do. The parts are more expensive, the testing is expensive, the people to write the procedures and execute them are expensive. As the team gets larger, the fraction of time spent communicating among the team goes up, etc. By comparison, going from 6 to 7 is easy..(although “the ride” might cost a bit, the process is straightforward, and doesn’t require much development)
There’s a reason AOs call for technology to be at TRL 6 by PDR or CDR. The hard part, and the technology risk, is retired by then.
Nice summary jimlux. Thanks for summarizing this.
Oh my god that’s a bad idea.
Why not just replace arsenic with cyanide?
Dr. Richard Aubrecht, Vice President of Moog Inc. said “Congress should insist NASA have clear statements of objectives to be accomplished with target dates.” First off, Congress isn’t supposed to be assigning NASA’s objectives; the President is. I guess Congress has been overstepping their bounds for so long that people have come to expect it. Perhaps Dr. Aubrecht is not aware of the SLS, which is the only NASA thing that Congress is interested in.
In the Hearing Charter, the entire Inspector General “Report” seems meaningless to me. There are so many factors that can affect all of these numbers (some of which have absolutely nothing to do with NASA), which are not presented, that drawing any conclusions from the table is completely invalid. For example, the NTRs are like science publications, you don’t hand one over until you’re sure of your facts, which could take years, so an NTR submitted this year might have been a decade in creation, and may have been funded by peanuts, and may be very complex and/or controversial and/or very similar to an existing technology/patent, which means it might be in court for years. etc… You can “prove” anything with a table of statistics, but that doesn’t make it either true, accurate or useful.
The Subcommittee’s report Spurring Economic Growth and Competitiveness Through NASA Derived Technologies says the following: “NASA has established formal procedural requirements for technology commercialization. Accordingly, NASA project managers must consider commercialization potential early in the project’s life cycle and, where appropriate, develop a Technology Commercialization Plan and strategy for achieving that potential. The policy outlines considerations for the commercialization plan, including pursuing partnerships, cooperative agreements and Space Act Agreements.” On a whim, I went to http://www.nasa.gov and did a search for “Technology Commercialization Plan” (including the quotes so it would be treated as a phrase). I got exactly zero hits on the search. So, I have to wonder, is there anyone at NASA actually responsible for ensuring or reviewing the use of this policy? If so, when is he due back from extended leave?
Sorry to be negative, but the guest speakers seem very much hand-picked to me, and when you extract all the fluff, their statements basically all say, technology transfer from NASA R&D is a good thing and it should continue, which we all already knew. So, I think this is another case where a lot of money and time was spent on a forgone conclusion. My personal conclusion, I think technology transfer to industry is extremely valuable; apparently http://www.nasa.gov doesn’t see it that way.
Steve
Hate NASA much? We live in America. It turns out the congress has some say in how NASA is run. In a checks and balances system, the executive branch has to get the support from those providing funding, which is the legislative branch. Dr. Aubrecht isn’t some corporate shill. He seemed genuine in his testimony. Pushing human exploration to new limits is really a driver in pushing our technology across all technical disciplines. Steve, I don’t see you holding a candle to Dr. Aubrecht’s qualifications so just keep spewing your hate – let the rest of us deride you on your lack of qualifications.
Saying this wide cross section of industry is hand picked is just crazy. I can’t see any way that challenging humanity’s capability is a bad thing for technology progression. Doing hard things makes people develop amazing things, it’s just a matter of survival. I, personally, am impressed with the unintended bleed-through in human sensors, energy technology, and controls technology presented at the hearing. I’m a little bit put-off by the NASA viewpoint that side technology development has any value. It seemed like a sand box but then the chief technologist brought out a couple of boxes of sand. It’s clear – NASA doesn’t get it.
Doing hard things and challenging humanity can’t lead to something bad. Asking them to invent on the side seems like wasted money. Several of the “hand picked” speakers made sense. Ask NASA to do their charter and push the limits of human spaceflight. If anything will add to our economy, this will. The fact is this – doing hard thing leads to creating new capabilities. Who cares what the NASA technology spin-off magazine says. Let’s discontinue that publication, let’s focus on pushing humanity forward in doing hard things!
Trainwreck_Spotter
I don’t hate NASA at all; quite the opposite. My comments were aimed at aspects of the Hearing and the attached reports, and I stick by them. You, yourself, in your next post did something very similar, so I don’t understand why you object to me expressing my opinion on the matter.
As for you “doing hard things,” I have no idea where that came from. I certainly didn’t say anything related to it. I say they seem, to me, to be hand picked, because they were all more or less the same in terms of their viewpoint — the standard hearing boilerplate about being there, plus words that basically said, we think this is a good thing and NASA should keep doing it, which, like I said, everybody already knew. These Hearings are not cheap to do, so when one like this happens which produces nothing new, what did the tax payers get for their money?
I maintain that the Hearing was a waste of time and money, but that says nothing bad about NASA or any of the attendees who took part. I’m pro NASA, and those giving testimony are obviously very knowledgeable and capable people, or they wouldn’t have been asked to participate. You seem to have taken a lot from my post that I neither said nor intended.
Steve
Just reviewed the video and read the transcripts. Is it just me or does anyone else see the absurdity where industry testifies that NASA should stop doing sand box technology and the Chief Technologist bring a couple of boxes of sand? Doesn’t this really point out the absurdity of the administration’s current space policy? There are “challenges” to do things which “spurs growth” while there is zero validation of a business model to support it. It seems like industry is a little more qualified to judge feasibility yet NASA seems to think they’re the paragon of commercial values.
This was further emphasized by Rep. Rohrabacher’s strange comment regarding getting license fees for gov’t technologies. Maybe it’s just me but isn’t ALL NASA spending based on tax dollars? Why should US industry be taxed twice for the same thing. I’ll buy that foreign entities owe the US gov”t royalties but why should any US organization owe NASA anything more then what they gave to make the technology possible in the first place?
This was a very weird discussion and wreaked of U.S. Gov’t Inc. to me. Personally, I’m not a fan of taxing what our taxes already bought.
Trainwreck,
I like your closing statement “I’m not a fan of taxing what our taxes already bought.” but I’d like your further elaboration about how the flow of money and value proceeds. What I mean by this is:
If Group A – Taxpayers move $1000 dollars to a Group B – NASA agency activity that produces a government technology product worth $1 million dollars, who should benefit from that value creation? I assume you and most citizens would reply: the taxpayers should benefit. Agreed?
If there is a Group C – Commercial (private sector) users that Group B – NASA then chooses to license the technology to, the value that has been created is being directed to a subset of all taxpayers, call it Group C’ (prime). A few directly gain value and advantage, the rest do not. (Yes, there are always indirect and collateral gain distributions, but that’s its own secondary topic).
With respect to your comment on royalties: You say “Why should US industry be taxed twice for the same thing.”? The royalty equation is not a 2nd layer of taxation levied upon the private sector firm receiving the technology license. It is more a partial recapture of a fraction of the value that was moved from Group A through Group B to Group C’.
Your statement “… why should any US organization owe NASA anything more th[a]n what they gave to make the technology possible in the first place?” seems flawed.
Under the above scenario, a recipient of a given NASA technology as a taxpayer would have only ‘given’ $0.0001 dollars to a technology activity, to then receive a value product worth $1 million dollars (in other words the firm didn’t pay the entire $1000 tax bill.) yet from the tech transfer license they received the entire value-benefit. A royalty mechanism is a thin-means of recapture of some of the value, moving back to the taxpayers. Not great, but better than nothing.
Theory aside, I’ve never seen any potently effective means for handling interactions between the government and the private sector put in place or used, with respect to the creation of value and valuable outcomes. It is as though we all remain in the dark ages as to how value should be handled, fairly and effectively, between socially purposed and privately purposed groups.