Exploring the Unknown - NASA's History Office

EXPLORING THE UNKNOWN 399
are not sufficiently optimized for the market, and a large financial commitment must be
made to further develop and market the technology. Combined, it is not surprising that
studies showed a relatively low economic return to the information publications.
The second study released in 1977 was done by MathTech (a successor company to
Mathematica). This study looked at a number of successful technologies that the NASA
technology transfer office had encouraged with additional R&D funds and personnel.
[III-29] Technologies such as an improved firefighter’s breathing apparatus and zinc paint
coatings were analyzed from an economic benefits perspective. Benefit-cost ratios were calculated
and in some cases were quite high. The major problem with those results is not
that there were no significant benefits (there were), but that the cost figures were artificially
low because they were primarily the costs of transferring the technology, not the costs
involved with initially developing the technology. The selection of only a few successful
cases ignores other transfers that were not successful and, again, tends to overstate the benefit-cost
ratios. Nonetheless, an argument can be made that without the efforts of the
added value contributed by the technology transfer process, either there would have been
no benefits from these NASA innovations or the benefits would have come much later.
The Chapman study of 1989 is interesting because it selected 400 technologies mentioned
in Spinoff, and researchers performed interviews with the companies to attempt to
measure the cumulative benefits. They found that the benefits may have been as large as
$21 billion (spread over twenty years). However, the report did not attempt to calculate
the costs associated with the development and transfer of those technologies, nor did it
determine when or if those technologies might have been forthcoming from the firms
without NASA involvement. In addition, it did not attempt to separate the NASA investment
or stimulation of the products from prior and future company investments. In
essence, this report is a comprehensive update of the earlier studies that documented specific
cases of technologies moving from NASA to industry. [III-30]
Another aspect of technology transfer was the realization in the early 1970s that the
United States is unique among nations in the world in its openness concerning R&D
results from civilian (unclassified) government-sponsored work. During the early years of
the Nixon administration, an effort was made to provide U.S. government technology and
information to U.S. firms first. Recognizing that under the then-current operating practices
and laws of the nation, the United States could not easily restrict information from
foreign nations and firms, a program named FEDD (For Early Domestic Distribution) was
initiated. NASA participated in this program and made an attempt to get information to
U.S. industry before it was openly published. However, no formal evaluation was ever
made of the program, and a NASA white paper in 1978 essentially concluded that it was
impossible to enforce this policy. [III-31]
The NASA technology transfer office also invested considerable funds in activities
aimed at education and at encouraging new users for space data and products. To support
these transfer programs, the office also sponsored economic studies that focused on specific
program benefits. For example, there were a number of analyses performed in the
mid-1970s on the benefits that might be attributed to having improved information from
the Landsat series of remote-sensing satellites. 32 Because wheat is traded on the futures
market and the prices are highly volatile depending on the size of the worldwide crops,
32. See, for example, ECON, Inc., Economic Benefits of Improved Information on Worldwide Crop Production,
Report 76-243-1, November 15, 1976. A theoretical report on which the ECON studies were based was published
by D. Bradford and H. Kelejian, The Value of Information for Crop Forecasting with Bayesian Speculators: Theory and
Empirical Results, 1974, Documentary History Collection, Space Policy Institute, George Washington University,
Washington, DC.