The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced that it has dropped 56 of its patented technologies into the public domain. The space agency has also unveiled a searchable web database for trolling through the larger list of thousands of expired NASA patents that are already in the public domain.
NASA’s stated reason for raising the visibility of its released-patent program, and for moving 56 new technologies into the public domain, is to help “foster a new era of entrepreneurship that will again place America at the forefront of high-tech manufacturing and economic competitiveness,” in the words of Daniel Lockney, the agency’s tech-transfer program executive. Lockney said the agency hopes that releasing the new collection will encourage entrepreneurs to find new ways to commercialize publicly funded NASA technologies. The agency also hopes that the move could spur new partnerships with private industry, in part by “familiarizing commercial space companies with NASA capabilities.”
The 56 newly disclaimed patents cover a wide array of technical areas—including a fair dose of optics and photonics. Examples range from waveform-processing software to fiber-optic sensors to integrated photonics to solar energy.
According to a NASA press release, in selecting the 56 previous patents released into the public domain, NASA officials looked for candidate technologies with “high unit value,” but that had limited potential for licensing by the agency and that might still require fairly significant additional private development to become commercial. The agency’s technology transfer arm still maintains a portfolio of more than 1,000 patented technologies that it makes available to U.S. companies under formal licensing agreements.