NASA LANGLEY RESEARCH CENTER 1917-2017
Spinoffs
NASA Langley research produces wide-ranging benefits By J.R. Wilson
NASA critics from time to time ask why the United States spends so much money in space when there are major problems that need to be addressed on Earth. It is an argument that overlooks the space- and aviation-related developments that have benefitted a range of civilian and commercial activities. NASA supporters are fond of drawing attention to the fact that the agency’s budget is only about a half of 1 percent of the overall federal budget. Yet NASA does a lot with what could be considered – in relative terms – a shoestring budget. What’s more, that doesn’t even take into account the multitude of technologies, science, materials, and other spaceand aviation-related developments that have spun off into everyday civilian and commercial use. That is especially true – although perhaps more difficult to recognize – with the output of a research organization, such as NASA’s Langley Research Center, than from NASA’s more publicly visible flight centers, such as Johnson and Kennedy. For more than 40 years, NASA has highlighted these Earth-bound benefits in its annual Spinoff publication, a record of the agency’s Technology Transfer Program. While Spinoff’s tagline is “Bringing NASA Technology Down to Earth,” not everything at NASA is space related. At Langley, for example, research areas include materials and coatings, sensors and detectors, aeronautics and software, with most of the technology transfer licenses involving materials and coatings. Langley is the most prolific of NASA’s nine active centers in terms of patents licensed to industry and available
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for licensing, with 239 spinoffs since 1976, averaging five per year. Jennifer Hubble-Viudez, a licensing specialist in the Office of Innovation, part of Langley’s Office of Strategic Analysis, Communications and Business Development, described the process by which intellectual property patented by Langley makes its way into the commercial world, in line with the Technology Transfer Program’s own tagline: “Improving life on Earth, one technology at a time.” “When a business wants to use our technology, they do that through a license, usually a commercial license for a specific product or service, each of which is evaluated on its own. There is no set rate, but they normally pay an up-front fee at signing, then annual minimums each year and a royalty-based annual fee based on sales,” she explained. “NASA Langley owns the intellectual patents. Provisions are sometimes put in place for the inventor to work with the licensee and, if during the course of that work, new information or a new technology is developed, a joint ownership agreement goes into effect, sharing ownership of that property with the business. NASA also gets the benefit of learning what the business is doing, which helps further our research. When the
