we have human astronauts, we also focus on life sciences, what is needed to sustain life and have productive operations in space.
Everything we invest in is directly impacting a challenge we have in human spaceflight. That investment bears fruit for tech transfer into other commercial applications and industries beyond our internal mission needs.
I’m trying to arrange our relationships with other industries to learn from them as well. We have ‘spin-in’ technologies as well.
Typically we have focused on mainly energy, medicine, and aerospace. Increasingly, we’re seeing a lot more commonality with artificial intelligence, machine learning, and transportation.
We are actively operating in the International Space Station so most of our focus has to do with sustainable operations in an austere environment. In these environments, you don’t have water and food; you have to recycle and reuse. Those types of technologies have a lot of opportunities for transfer, [like] for living in remote areas, etc.
The Van Allen belt shields Earth from radiation. In long space flight, we are going to be exposing astronauts to fairly hazardous doses of radiation. There is no existing understanding of both the effects on the human body and countermeasures we could take. All of those things are right front and center. The oncology and medical worlds are dealing with dose radiation, and the unintended consequences of that. Maybe we can both make progress faster.
X: There is not much awareness of commercialization of NASA technologies, though there might be [with] those products. When people think of innovation, it’s not perhaps NASA they think of.
DT: There is probably as much or more innovation and true new science being discovered today. But sure, as far as a regional or national identity, it’s not the same place it was in the 60s and 70s. Then the space program was so uniquely set apart with the rest of society. We didn’t have a dot-com community, a Silicon Valley. NASA occupied the stage by itself. We are now competing for that [innovation] marketplace with a lot of cool innovative projects going on. It’s a blossoming of the space effort, not a dilution. The investment we made that dominated our consciousness has grown and flowered into a whole range of high tech sectors.
There’s a lot of great stuff going on at NASA. Our philosophy of developing and innovating through the 80s was far more introspective and insular. And today we’ve got all these smart people outside [of NASA] and we need a much more collaborative approach.
While we’re developing systems like Orion interplanetary spacecraft, we are also concurrently operating the ISS. It’s now been 15 years that the station has been crewed. It’s the first beginnings of a private sector space economy. Not unlike the way NASA in the last century was very involved in the airline industry—the government seeded airline operations—
