NASA on Thursday opened up access to the software created for various missions and operations with the publication of a catalog by the space agency's Technology Transfer Program, which points interested parties to methods for obtaining code that interests them.

The move is the opening step in a plan to more efficiently disseminate software code to other government agencies and private organizations, said Daniel Lockney, the head of the Technology Transfer in NASA's Office of the Chief Technologist.

"This software has always been available, but it hasn't always been accessible," Lockney told PCMag. "For decades, with anything NASA has invented, we've looked at it and tried to determine if there are any other commercial applications for it. Increasingly we're finding that our inventions are more and more about software.

"And what this catalog points to is not just rocket science, it's relevant to management of complex operations, robotics, design tools, project management tools, scheduling software, and more."

The new catalog offers natural language descriptions of NASA software tools, and contact information for the relevant agency offices and individuals who can supply the actual code. It's the first step in a project that will see the code itself put into an accessible repository sometime in 2015, Lockney said.

Once software created by NASA is cleared by the agency for wider distribution, a process that involves it being declassified by the U.S. government, it will be entered into the repository and made available to anybody who wants it.

NASA has a long history of sharing its aerospace innovations with the wider world for practical and often novel applications in the sciences, commerce, and industry. Many of those applications have been documented in the space agency's long-running annual publication Spinoff, as well as in the free periodical NASA Tech Briefs, which highlights hundreds of NASA inventions in three issues sent out to subscribers per year.

Some of NASA's direct contributions to today's technological landscape are well known and range far afield from space-related tech—for example, the agency had a direct hand in developing the electronic process used to scan credit cards in point-of-sale systems.

But there are some other famous technologies which are commonly misattributed to NASA, like Tang, Velcro, and Teflon, Lockney noted.

"We often get credited with Tang, but we didn't invent it," he laughed. "That was General Foods. We needed lightweight ways to carry food into space and a tasty, dehydrated drink was a good one. We also sometimes get credited with Velcro, which was invented by George de Mestral, and Teflon, which was actually a DuPont product."

Lockney emphasized that while physical products are still being created by NASA and its partners, it's the agency's software code that is the real potential gold mine for the outside world. He described NASA's software trove as a "cornucopia" of code in multiple programming languages and across various platforms that could be used in any number of applications for different disciplines and industries.

NASA's software has actually been openly available to third parties for some time. But it's been difficult to access, simply because it has been tough to discover specific types of code the agency possesses. Still, Lockney said NASA-created software has been used in the past by scores of government organizations and private firms to improve their own systems and products.

"Our design software has been used to make everything from guitars to roller coasters to Cadillacs. Our CFD, or computational fluid dynamics code—it's kind of like having a desktop wind tunnel—[it's] been used on all manner of aircraft but also for cool terrestrial stuff like perfecting race cars by Aston Martin, NASCAR, and Formula One, or designing better bike helmets by Giro.

"Our scheduling software that keeps the Hubble Space Telescope operations straight has been used for scheduling MRIs at busy hospitals and as control algorithms for online dating services," he said. "Algorithms we developed for tracking, interpreting, and storing deep space imagery have been used for tracking and identification of endangered species ... and that same image interpretation and storage software is being used to build large databases of ultrasound arterial scans to help diagnose heart health and predict risk for heart attacks."

Lockney also made it clear that NASA doesn't see the improvement of accessibility to its code as a one-way street. Asked if the agency expects to reap the benefits from outside parties taking its software and improving upon it over time, he simply said, "Yes, absolutely."

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