National Aeronautics and Space Administration (U.S.)

The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is a large, centrally organized network (funded primarily by the U.S. government) of regional research centers and affiliated research groups whose work, broadly construed, falls within a general framework of aerospace science and technology. Most Americans associate NASA with its crowning achievements in space exploration. Though NASA has always had concrete goals for its space programs, it also has a longstanding commitment to basic research in aerospace exploration. Throughout the 1990s, NASA encouraged development in nanoscience and nanotechnology for advancing basic space science, space industrialization and colonization, and space travel. NASA promoted innovations in nanoscience and nanotechnology primarily through three related venues: thematic research centers, competitions, and special conferences. In addition to funding these development activities through its general budget, NASA also funneled specific funds from the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) to nanoscience and nanotechnology research.

NASA has both official and unofficial thematic research centers committed to advancing nanoscience and nanotechnology. The Center for Nanotechnology, a dedicated research center at NASA Ames, began in the mid-1990s as a group of scientists interested in exploring the potential of nanotechnology. Around the same time, clusters of scientists emerged at other NASA sites, including the Marshall Space Flight Center, the Jet Propulsion Lab, and the Goddard Space Center, to investigate nanoscience and nanotechnology. Most researchers interested in nanoscience and nanotechnology found safe havens at the official research centers or special offices committed to exploratory research. Many of NASA's regional sites had such centers and offices. At Marshall Space Flight Center, the Advanced Project Office housed exploratory projects, including those that proposed innovations using nanoscience and nanotechnology. NASA's now de-funct Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) was also a sanctuary for nanotechnology projects, such as models of solar sails envisioned using nanomaterials.

The exploratory research centers and offices operated with limited budgets, especially in relation to NASA's overall budget. The NNI budget allocation to [Page 571]NASA was estimated at $13.7 million in 2010, with $15.8 million projected for 2011.

A NASA-engineered DNA strand between metal atom contacts could function as a molecular electronics device.

Even those centers that received funds from NASA's portion of NNI funding operated with significant budgetary restraints. Competitions provided one strategy for the centers to remove some of the burden of research costs onto privately funded teams and individuals while still encouraging innovation. These competitions followed an “X Prize” model. Teams and individuals invested their own funds to build or simulate prototypes, and then competed with their prototypes at a NASA-hosted event. Winners usually received a monetary prize and publicity. One such competition, which encouraged citizen-inventors to devise a space elevator tether, resulted in models of nanoenabled designs. Both the formal and informal research centers hosted regular conferences throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s. Following the conferences, organizers usually published a set a conference proceedings and papers. In the late 1990s, NASA Ames's Advanced Projects Office hosted a space elevator conference and then consequently published pieces from the conference. Though the space elevator was not a new concept for NASA, participants at this particular conference did give it a new spin. Conference participants imagined how nanotechnology could convert the space elevator from an experiment to a realistic technology.

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