NIAC has funded research into spacesuits that could be coated with proteins to generate electricity solely through the natural movement of the astronauts wearing them (Illustration: NASA/Pat Rawlings/SAIC)

NASA should revive its Institute for Advanced Concepts, a blue-skies idea mill that closed in 2007, says an expert panel – but it says the new incarnation should have its feet a little closer to the ground.

NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) was founded in 1998 to harvest innovative ideas for spaceflight and aeronautics from outside the NASA community.

It received $4 million a year, about 0.02 per cent of NASA’s annual budget, and funded more than 100 futuristic spaceflight and aeronautics projects that no one else would touch. The projects included motion-sensitive spacesuits that generate their own power, techniques to construct buildings in space using radio waves, and spherical robots to explore Mars, among many others.

But in 2007, a combination of budget constraints and internal politics shut the organisation down. On Friday, a committee convened by the US National Research Council released a report suggesting that NASA bring back the think tank.


The committee, which included a mix of people from academia and industry, found that NIAC had been successful right up until its final days. “They were definitely living up to their contract at the time they were terminated,” says committee co-chair Robert Braun, a professor of space technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Three NIAC-funded projects are now “on a path toward one day being a NASA mission”, Braun says, including a prototype plasma rocket, an X-ray interferometer that is being considered for NASA’s Black Hole Imager mission, and a “star shade“, which could help existing space telescopes search for extrasolar planets.

Other projects have had unexpected medical spinoffs, like a skin-tight spacesuit that can help children with cerebral palsy walk. “By and large, the topics that they invested in were pushing the state of the art, were very advanced in terms of far-out thinking, and I’d say a decent percentage of them had the possibility of turning into something,” Braun told New Scientist.

Room for improvement

The committee had a few suggestions for improvement, and for preventing a new NIAC from facing the old one’s problems.

One of the reasons for NIAC’s demise was organisational. In 2004, it was folded into NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, the section of the agency that had earlier that year been directed to return humans to the moon.

“There was a cultural mismatch there,” Braun says. “Over time, NASA itself has become more and more mission-focused, which means if you’re not doing something directly related to the mission that I’m gonna launch next year, then I don’t need you. That was the beginning of the end for NIAC.”

To protect a future NIAC from the same fate, the committee recommended there be an organisation within NASA that also focuses on advanced concepts that could receive NIAC-funded projects and develop them into actual missions.

Eyes on the horizon

The committee also recommends that a new NIAC come down to Earth – just a little. NIAC’s original mission was to pursue revolutionary ideas, projects that would be ready for development in 10 to 40 years. “But most of the things that were done by the old NIAC were closer to 40 than to 10,” Braun says. The committee suggests that a new NIAC focus on projects for “10 years and beyond.”

“It’s still possible that the new NIAC would fund things that are out there quite a ways, but the committee was hoping for more advanced concepts that will come to fruition in about 10 years,” Braun says.

Despite the current uncertainty in NASA’s future plans and budget, the committee says that NIAC is still a worthwhile investment. “NIAC was efficiently run, there was no waste of money,” says John Cramer, a physicist at the University of Washington and a former member of a council that reviewed NIAC projects. “NASA got an amazing amount of bang for the buck,” Cramer told New Scientist.

“I think any organisation, whether it’s NASA or Google, needs to spend some small amount of its resources looking to the future,” Braun says. “It’s always a good time for something like this.”