Space Technology Transfer

Made for Space, Made for All

To fully enjoy reading this post, listen to Technologic by Daft Punk.

Space technologies are directly beneficial to our daily life in several ways, we came across their multiple benefits on many pages of this blog. However, there are also indirect positive effects which are less known to the public but equally important. Continue to read if you want to know more…

“Space is a hard”, this is the most common sentence echoed when something doesn’t go as planned in a space related activity. It means that reaching space and working there is tough, hence failure is sometimes inevitable. However, scientists and engineers are putting a lot of knowledge, effort and creativity to overcome the countless problems they encounter for every space mission. They invent new solutions and technologies to break though the barriers and push the boundaries and this results in a rapid and unusual development that could be impossible without such cosmic dares. On the other hand, the public is spending a lot of tax money to allow this magic to occur.

What happens to all the intellectual property generated so far? Are those scientific and technological advancements confined to the space arena and the tax money lost in space? Luckily for all of us the answer is no, they are not limited to space exploration. They are shared constantly with the “non-space” industries, enabling them to generate new wealth out of that initial investment.
In order to do that, space agencies like NASA and ESA launched specific technology transfer programs, aimed to bring indirect benefits from space to the ground (see NASA Technology Transfer Program, ESA Technology Transfer).
The mechanism of these programs is pretty easy. First of all, there is the discovery of a new technology, developed to overcome a limit imposed by the harsh space environment while trying to perform a specific activity. Once the technology is functioning as expected, the related intellectual property is disclosed to the public, usually through dedicated web sites or communication channels. If companies and entrepreneurs find an interesting technology to enhance one of their products or to make a new one, they could sign an agreement with the space agency to license its use.
In addition, space agencies manage also special business incubators, specialized in supporting new start-up enterprises aiming to bring space technology to the “standard” economy. Examples are the NASA Kennedy Space Center Innovation Incubator and ESA Business Incubation.

Let’s have a look at some specific cases, just to understand the wide scope of technology transfer.
Do you like your mobile phone cameras? Are you having fun creating HD videos with your Go-Pro? You need to know that they would not be performing so well without the CMOS image sensors and that this technology was developed at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA JPL) to equip spacecrafts with new high-resolution cameras.
In the last year or so, how many times did you measure your temperature with an infrared thermometer? In the early Nineties, the company Diatek Corporation partnered with NASA JPL to produce this new kind of thermometers, adapting infrared sensors developed to measure the temperature of stars. So, not only you are made of stars, but also your temperature is measured like the stars’.
What about something more spacepolitan? For more than twenty years, the ESA-led Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative programme, better known as MELiSSA, has been studying how to sustain astronauts during long missions in space. Its objective is to develop a closed life-support system, processing waste to deliver oxygen, water and food. One of the most promising technologies developed so far is a special filtering system for water, capable to remove many pollutants, including nitrates. Thanks to its partnership with MELiSSA, the French company Firmus was able to built a water purification station and test it for a school in Morocco, for the village of Sidi Taïbi, close to Rabat. The population of this town was growing rapidly and providing fresh water for everyone was a big issue, since the groundwater was rich in nitrates, not suitable for human consumption. Thanks to this test station, the school was able to use the filtered groundwater to provide fresh water to students and teachers, and the company gained valuable experience whilst developing the product. Which UN Sustainable Development Goal is supported by this technology transfer? Of course, SDG 6 Clean Water and Sanitation!
These are plenty more “spin-off” initiatives, some of them not so striking but equally important, and others in development which will land on the ground in the near future.

As Dr Geoffrey Nicholson (3M chemist, inventor of the Post-It Notes) said, “research is the transformation of money into knowledge; innovation (technology transfer) is the transformation of knowledge into money”. Hence, space exploration is not only offering direct benefits to Humanity, but it has also a positive cross impact on the normal economy, helping it to be more efficient, to consume less resources, and finally to improve our daily life. Investing in space is investing in our future. So, let’s shout even louder our spacepolitans motto: space for all, all for space!