{"id":890,"date":"2007-12-28T01:53:02","date_gmt":"2007-12-28T06:53:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/?p=890"},"modified":"2007-12-28T12:32:36","modified_gmt":"2007-12-28T17:32:36","slug":"new-life-for-niac","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/?p=890","title":{"rendered":"New life for NIAC?"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>I have written several posts (most recently, here<\/a> and here<\/a>) about the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC<\/a>) and it’s struggle to stay alive.\u00a0 At the end of last August, NASA had killed this agency, citing budget issues.<\/p>\n

From this posting<\/a> by Leonard David at LiveScience, it appears that at least some people in the House Appropriations Committee<\/a> think this may not\u00a0have been such\u00a0a good idea.<\/p>\n

Quoting\u00a0Mr. Leonard’s\u00a0post: “From the report, the committee has expressed concern that NASA has decided to close the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts ‘without a rigorous assessment of the Institute\u2019s merit.'”<\/em><\/p>\n

I can only say “Amen<\/em>” to that…\u00a0 I’m sure that both NASA and the Appropriations Committee\u00a0have a gazillion special interest groups yammering at them about how “their project” has to be funded.\u00a0 But\u00a0NIAC was underwriting, and leveraging,\u00a0an investment in the future, real “blue-sky” stuff.\u00a0 Their investment into Dr. Edwards research was a perfect example.\u00a0 Anyone who attended or paid attention to this year’s Space Elevator Games and saw not only a carbon-nanotube tether, but also multiple laser-powered climbs, knows that this is an idea whose time is\u00a0rapidly approaching.\u00a0 And the NIAC grant to Dr. Edwards helped make it happen.<\/p>\n

The final NIAC report (available here<\/a>) makes for very interesting reading.\u00a0 The NIAC “Funding Tree” (shown as a graphic at the top of this post – click on it for a larger version) shows how NIAC-distributed funds leveraged private-sector funds.\u00a0 The most successful of these, again according to this graphic, was Dr. Edwards work with the Space Elevator concept.\u00a0 NIAC summarized it’s funding of Dr. Edward’s research as follows:<\/p>\n

“This effort sparked the creation of numerous businesses and attracted funding with a particular emphasis on the development of carbon nanotube materials. Space Elevator has been the focus of numerous prize competitions, including NASA\u2019s Centennial Challenges program. Additional support: at least $8.5 million. Future impact: billions if not trillions of dollars in launch savings relative to current methods. As one NIAC Fellow explained: “The Space Elevator would change everything.”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I love that last line; “The Space Elevator would change everything.”\u00a0 It would, it certainly would.<\/p>\n

If you have a member of the Appropriations Committee<\/a> from your state (and better yet, from your district), write him\/her a letter and let them know what you think.\u00a0\u00a0Compared to the $555 billion dollar appropriations bill\u00a0which was just signed into law, the\u00a0total NIAC budget of $5.9 million (over 9 years)\u00a0is not even a rounding error.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have written several posts (most recently, here and here) about the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) and it’s struggle to stay alive.\u00a0 At the end of last August, NASA had killed this agency, citing budget issues. From this posting by Leonard David at LiveScience, it appears that at least some people in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,6,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-materials","category-news-announcements","category-spaceelevatorcompetitions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=890"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}