This could put space within reach of private business and also allow NASA to benefit from its investment in space science, transportation and technology, according to Dan Tam, who heads NASA's commercialization office.
NASA has received approval from the White House and sent a request to a House subcommittee to amend the Commercial Space Act of 1998, Tam said. Under the current version of that law, the federal government, not NASA, gets to keep any profit the agency earns through money-making ventures. But the space agency wants that law changed so that NASA has some freedom to negotiate with private firms and keep the profits it earns from commercial deals, Tam said.
"This would just accelerate the commercial development of space," Tam said.
For example, pharmaceutical companies are very interested in the potential of growing protein crystals in microgravity, but they might not be interested in paying countless millions of dollars to see if it would work Tam said.
If the NASA Administrator were allowed to reach a deal with such companies to provide low-cost access to place experiments on the International Space Station, or the Space Shuttle, all parties would benefit, Tam said. Private companies would develop profitable space-related operations, NASA would earn royalties from technologies it helps to develop, and the public would spend less tax revenue funding NASA.
"This would simply give us something that the universities, the non-profits and even the Department of Defense already has," Tam said.
Sources at the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics, the group first in line to consider any change in legislation, acknowledged receiving NASA's request, but said it was too early to make any comment about the proposal.
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