MOFFETT FIELD — NASA’s Ames Research Center is planning a cutting-edge cybersecurity facility at Moffett Field to protect space missions from potentially catastrophic hacking and to increase collaboration with Silicon Valley.

Proponents of “Gryphon X” envision a center connecting Ames to the brainpower of the region’s tech sector, with benefits flowing both ways.

The project is in “the proposal and formulation stage,” and no budget has been set or funds allocated, Jerry Davis, chief information officer for Ames, said in a statement emailed to this newspaper. Davis said the program may be built jointly but did not confirm a statement from a think tank that Silicon Valley companies would help fund it.

“Gryphon X focuses on the reduction of cyber-based risks to NASA’s missions and their highly connected systems and high-value hardware and software in the field,” Davis said.

The plan arose about a year ago from conversations between Ames officials and Silicon Valley tech executives, according to the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, a Washington, D.C., think tank. “Some of these big companies were willing to throw money into the budget to do it,” institute senior fellow James Scott said. “Funding didn’t seem to be an issue.”

Gryphon X would help build a needed bridge between Silicon Valley’s tech sector and government agencies, but only if done in a way that allowed the private sector to profit, said analyst Avivah Litan from the Gartner technology research and advisory company.

“You can’t just put a building out there and ask people to get together and collaborate,” Litan said. “You have to have some business incentive on both sides. The Silicon Valley guys have to make money out of it, and the public sector guys have to get better security out of it.”

Ames officials asked the institute, which has ties to Silicon Valley security companies and the Pentagon, the National Security Agency and other federal agencies, to talk the proposal up on Capitol Hill, Scott said. In House and Senate offices, “The support was instant,” Scott said.

Across the federal government, cybersecurity has become an increasingly high-profile concern. This year’s White House report to Congress on information security noted that the number of cybersecurity incidents in federal agencies rose 10 percent to nearly 80,000 in fiscal year 2015 over the previous year.

In private industry, 90 percent of senior security executives worldwide believe their firms are vulnerable to cybersecurity breaches, according to San Jose data security firm Vormetric’s 2016 Data Threat Report. “Many of the most pernicious attacks we’ve seen in the recent past have come, not just from insiders, but from an assortment of external actors — including cybercriminals, nation-states, hacktivists and cyberterrorists,” the Vormetric report states.

For the space shuttle and NASA’s work in general, cybersecurity is of crucial importance, said Betsy Cooper, executive director of the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity. “They have networks that can be vulnerable,” Cooper said.

A profound need exists for Gryphon X, according to a report by the infrastructure institute, to collaborate with industry in the face of threats facing the space program — and ordinary citizens.

“Make no mistake, America is at war,” the report states. “The American people are subject to exploitation by a vast and nebulous storm of adversaries. If an enemy country shut off emergency systems and power grids across California for example, and then invaded, the United States may be taken unaware.”

Gartner analyst Litan said hackers could indeed shut off the power grid or hack a NASA space mission. “We need to have a sense of urgency about the situation. We just don’t want to wait like Brussels did or like we did with 9/11,” Litan said.

The institute, which counts representatives from Bay Area information and infrastructure security firms Centrify, Exabeam, Covenant, Forcepoint and Global Risk Advisors as fellows, said Gryphon X would train government personnel and private-industry staff in cybersecurity. Current anti-hacking training and awareness initiatives in the U.S. are only 85 percent effective, so “at least 15 out of every 100 employees do not retain the training necessary to not make the mistakes that put organizations at risk,” the report states.

The institute’s report outlines possible outcomes following a hack of NASA, ranging from the theft of intellectual property to a space shuttle crash or the steering of a drone into a federal building.

NASA is now “looking at the cost/benefit analysis and value proposition” of Gryphon X, Davis said.

Contact Ethan Baron at 408-920-5011, or follow him at Twitter.com/ethanbaron.