NASA Aeronautical Externships

06/14/05 00:00:00    

By Michael Mealling

Depending on what minute you catch Congress it looks as though NASA's aeronautical budget is going to be restored. The problem is that it isn't clear what the demand is. Some suggest that the workers will be paid to dust unused wind tunnels. If there is money but no work then it might make sense to see if they can be used by industry somehow.

My suggestion is a type of externship. This has been suggested elsewhere but often it required the company to deal with the onerous overhead of dealing with NASA regulations. For many companies that overhead would be a severe distraction from the business of building products.

The prefered system would be to flip the point of view around: make NASA apply to the companies. Create a system whereby companies can easily advertise positions and/or research that needed to be done and have NASA's budget pay for the time needed to implement it. The same could go for resources: a NASA wind tunnel staff could make proposals to “alt.space” companies such as “instead of doing all that CFD analysis, just come down to our wind tunnel and we can do it for you”. The proposal could even include monetary or resource allocations that the company would provide. I.e. “NASA Ames wind tunnel #7 plus two engineers would like to help you do supersonic tests of your airframe, NASA will kick in 80% of the employee costs and 100% of the wind tunnel costs. We believe that our resources can save you X percentage in your vehicle development costs.” The NASA employee technically works for the company as an independent contractor. They follow company policies and procedures. But their salary and benefits are paid by NASA.

This puts the onus on the NASA staff to find something interesting to do. And it sets a bar such that the company only gets motivated staffers that apply. It really is a classical externship. And once the employee rotates back into NASA they now have a different perspective on how things can be done.