NASA Space Exploration: Economic Returns and Innovation

Introduction: The Case for Space Investment

The United States' economic challenges today are directly related to a lack of consistent innovation of the kind generated by investments in space exploration and the many processes required to make these programs successful. From the most fundamental aspects of project management—which now guide the development, testing, and commercial launch of military and private aircraft—to the development of razor-thin chemical polymers (Fischetti & Herbert, 1983, p. 68) that act as heat shields on returning capsules, the space program delivers a higher national return on investment than virtually any other public activity. What makes continual investment in space exploration so critical during recessionary periods is that America requires a steady stream of new innovation at both the product and process level in order to grow. Without innovation, the American economy will shrink and become vulnerable to global competitors that have nothing more to offer than lower labor costs.

The intent of this paper is to discuss why America needs to invest aggressively in space exploration and programs. It is important to take a strategic perspective when evaluating the many contributions of the space program to America's global competitiveness. There are the everyday products made possible by NASA's research and development contributions, yet the greater, more far-reaching, and fundamentally world-changing contributions must also be kept in mind. Consider the many innovations in airborne astronomy (Semmel, Davis, Leucht, & Rowe, 2006, pp. 33–35), project management, and systems engineering (Pruitt, 1999, p. 34), and the necessity of creating entirely new processes—and the extent of NASA's contributions becomes clear. NASA has categorized its many contributions to innovation into seven areas compiled in a 217-page downloadable publication. Divided into contributions to health and medicine; transportation; consumer, home, and recreation; environmental and agricultural resources; computer technology; and industrial productivity, these categories represent over one hundred product, process, and system innovations.

Apollo Program Contributions

President John F. Kennedy's immortal speech galvanized the nation with the vision that landing a man on the moon was both achievable and imperative for the United States. It launched one of the most productive eras of research, development, discovery, and innovation—and correspondingly, one of the greatest periods of economic growth in 20th-century America. This was no accident. The entire nation was fascinated with the Apollo program's progress, and the engineering teams working on it were on a mission to beat the Soviets to the moon. It was called the Space Race, but it could equally have been called America's defining national passion of the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s. Out of this intense drive to succeed, a myriad of innovations came into existence.

The most valuable of these were the systems, processes, and techniques that gave America the ability to manage large-scale, highly integrated projects to a deadline and within a budget. Project management during the Apollo program progressed from the use of large quadrille pads that lined the expansive halls of prime contractors—Lockheed, Martin Marietta, McDonnell Douglas, Northrop, and others (Pruitt, 1999, pp. 33–34)—to software-based constraint systems capable of optimizing development schedules across costs, deadlines, and subcontractor dependencies. The lessons learned from the Apollo program in project management are today also applied in complex design analysis and constraint modeling for transportation systems. As is true of many process-based technological innovations from the space program, fundamental project management lessons were quickly transferred to private-sector programs for commercial aircraft.

The generational leap in efficiency achieved by Boeing over its French competitor Airbus can be attributed in part to project management innovations, as can the broader field of systems engineering. It is important to recognize that process-based innovations such as project management have fundamentally reshaped America's ability to compete in industries of high national interest, including aerospace, defense, and commercial aviation. Without American leadership in project management innovation, commercial air travel today would be exponentially more expensive, less reliable, less maintainable, and accessible only to the wealthy. Enterprise project management—an Apollo program initiative—is directly responsible for the existence of low-cost airfare in the world today.

A second area that has experienced the multiplicative benefits of Apollo investment is the field of advanced chemical polymers, compounds, and chemical substrates for creating welds resistant to extreme heat and gravitational forces. The invention of chemically derived welds and the continual refinement of the bonding agent Polyimide further illustrate the multiplicative effects of innovation that Apollo and follow-on programs catalyzed (Fischetti & Herbert, 1983, pp. 68–69). Today, many critics of space exploration drive hybrid vehicles in an effort to reduce their environmental footprint—yet when they climb into those high-efficiency cars, they might pause to thank the NASA engineers whose polymer research made lightweight but exceptionally durable plastics a reality. Most striking, however, is the impact that Apollo-era advances in polymers and chemical innovation have had on microprocessor performance and large-scale computing systems (Arepalli, Fireman, Huffman, & Maloney, 2005, pp. 27–28). This chain of events demonstrates just how multiplicative the benefits of innovation can be: one significant advance in polymer chemistry can generate exceptional gains across many industries, from auto manufacturing to high-performance computing.

Space Shuttle Innovations

The Space Shuttle translated the vision of a reusable spacecraft into reality, making the concept of a permanently orbiting laboratory possible. From this orbiting lab, thousands of innovations have aided the United States in industries of very high national interest, including telemetry and the life sciences.

The unique vantage point of an orbiting laboratory gave astronauts—many of whom hold doctoral degrees in astronomy and engineering—an unparalleled platform for conducting telemetry analysis (Semmel, Davis, Leucht, & Rowe, 2006, pp. 34–35). The goals of these analyses varied by mission, with astronaut teams concentrating on Mars mapping during certain flights and Earth observation during others. The teams at Google owe a meaningful debt to investments in Mars mapping technology and the processes it refined. Google Street View is based on lessons learned from that mapping work. Google and all other users of digital mapping software have similarly benefited from Earth-based telemetry analysis.

In addition, the lessons learned from long-term zero-gravity experiments in biology and the life sciences continue to deliver dividends. The development of entirely new approaches to creating biological compounds—with direct implications for pharmaceutical development—has progressed rapidly as a result of Space Shuttle research (Hertzfeld, 2002, p. 311). Life sciences contributions from the Space Shuttle era remain ongoing.

Conclusion

The many contributions of the space program over the last five decades have revolutionized the United States, helped balance global power, and kept America at the forefront of economic growth. Considering the massive scope of innovations that emerged from the Apollo program alone—and the era of unprecedented economic expansion that accompanied it—there is a compelling, evidence-based case for a strong return on investment in space programs. The nation's capacity to navigate one of the worst global recessions in modern history drew in part on cash management and global funding concepts developed during space program operations (Maitner & Otero, 2004, pp. 58–59).

For America to forfeit its lead and allow another nation to industrialize space (Williamson, 1982, pp. 406–407) is to allow these hard-won national strengths to erode. The bottom line is clear: for America to retain its global leadership and to manage the increasing complexity of its economic position, the many lessons learned from investing in space exploration and programs are well worth the cost.