Re: CONGRATULATIONS BIGELOW AEROSPACE!

"Jeff Findley" <jeff.findley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The point I take away from this is that NASA should stick to what it does
best, research and technology transfer.

Can you make that more fine-grained? I'm always curious about how NASA
decides to allocate research effort to "mission-specific" vs.
"space-specific" vs. broader targets, because I start from the general
premise that it usually takes a certain critical mass of talent,
team-building time, and money to get productive R&D.

And there's always a temptation to empire-building... to want to be
able to say "yeah, we have people working on sexy high-profile topic
area X," whether it's productive or not. (I hasten to add that this
applies no more to NASA than to academic and corporate research
organizations. People who think the politics and turf wars of NASA
centers are uniquely awful should study up on IBM Watson vs Almaden vs
Haifa vs Zurich, or the wrangles within the university consortia that
run the DoE labs, or...)

Take robotics, for example; there's a contributor here who often
argues that it's crucial to progress in space. I can see his point --
and in fact I know some very sharp NASA robotics researchers -- but I
can't help wondering what unique needs and aptitudes NASA brings to
the topic. There are plenty of terrestrial applications for smarter,
more autonomous robots -- and plenty of interested corporations and
academic labs with healthy budgets. So... should robotics be
considered a core competence for NASA research? Or would they be
better off letting others push the envelope there, and putting those
resources into space-specific topics that others *aren't* all over?
.

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