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Gary Martin, Director of Partnerships: NASA in Silicon Valley Podcast

Season 1Sep 7, 2016

A conversation with Gary Martin, Director of Partnerships at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley.

NASA in Silicon Valley Podcast

A conversation with Gary Martin, Director of Partnerships at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. For more information on NASA efforts with small businesses and technology transfers, visit sbir.nasa.gov. You can also learn more about NASA Partnerships at nasa.gov/ames/partnerships.

Transcript

Matthew C. Buffington (Host): You are listening to NASA in Silicon Valley episode 7. In the news today, we have an interesting story on NASA.gov/Ames about NASA’s ORACLES campaign and upcoming trip to Africa. ORACLES is a fancy acronym for the Observations of Aerosols Above Clouds and their interactions. Basically, it’s studying the effect smoke has on clouds and the climate.

Today on the show, we chat with the Director of Partnerships at NASA Ames, Gary Martin. We cover how NASA is partnering with various commercial and academic groups, including how NASA works with small business and startups right here in Silicon Valley. Here is Gary Martin.

[Music]

Host: One of my favorite talks I’d ever heard was somebody was talking about working at NASA, and they’re like, okay, who’s interested in science, who’s interested in engineering, and different people stand up, raise their hands. Okay, who’s into accounting, and some people — or, who’s into being a journalist, or writing, or design? So basically, you get everybody.

Gary Martin:That’s really good, I’m glad that — people don’t realize you can work all these different — in fact, almost any discipline you want to do, you can work at NASA.

Host: Of course, that was the whole way they wrap it in together. It’s like, no matter what it is, there’s a place for you at NASA.

Gary Martin: So, we help STEM people, and actually in our group we’ve been trying to make people aware, we do a lot of diplomacy for instance with our international work. And we need people who understand how to do that, and political scientists and things like that, they don’t realize they have a job at NASA. There’s special areas for those kinds of people.

Host:Yeah, it’s like really, there’s literally everything you could possibly do. So, talk about your group a little bit. What’s kind of — there’s not a lot of beakers and chop shops and rockets going on, but go into it a little bit.

Gary Martin: Right, so we have a couple offices within the partnership directorate that are mainly looking external to NASA, and looking at how to collaborate with different communities. So, I’ll go through some of them so you know what we’re doing.

So, we have the Small Business Innovative Research group, and Small Business Technology Transfer group, and we run that for the whole agency.

Host: So, it’s not just a Silicon Valley thing or Ames, this is like everybody?

Gary Martin: Yeah, so all centers implement it. We have what they call the Level Two office. There’s about $200 million a year going to small businesses through different phased approaches that they compete. And so, a small business in this respect is any business less than 500 people. In fact, we do everything we can to get the word out, especially here in Silicon Valley. All the entrepreneurs and the new startups, I always when I go to a group of them, I talk about these — it’s not easy money, but it’s money that’s out there to compete for, especially if you’re working…

Host: Which is gold to a young startup company, it’s a big deal.

Gary Martin: There’s a company right here in the NASA Research Park that started out as students coming out of Singularity University, and now they’ve already put space hardware up that’s Made In Space, who started with SBIR. I think they’re one of many success stories.

Host: They’re actually 3-D printing things on the Space Station.

Gary Martin: With their 3-D printer. And then they recently because of their work have gotten another NASA grant at $20 million to do a large 3-D printer concept that you can actually make large structures in space using their technique. That all started with a small grant from an SBIR.

Host: So, how do you end up in this kind of job? I’m guessing, are you from the area, or did you just happen to go to school — how do you end up at NASA?

Gary Martin: No, I’m new to this. I’m a systems engineer.

Host: OK. That’s helpful.

Gary Martin: And actually, talking about other jobs, I actually started out as an anthropologist.

Host: Really, that’s fascinating.

Gary Martin: And went back to school after being an archeologist for a while.

Host: But, that’s still a good science background.

Gary Martin: It depends on who you talk to. You know, it’s like social studies, but it does have a scientific approach, especially archaeology. But I went back and got a physics degree and a mathematics degree and became a systems engineer for my master’s, and have been working with NASA ever since. So, I started as a contractor in the mid-’80s.

Host: Was that here at Ames?

Gary Martin: No, I’m new to Ames. In fact, I started at Langley, on the east coast, one of the oldest NASA centers. And I went to NASA Headquarters and worked on the design of the space station mainly for microgravity experiments. And then went over to Goddard, where I worked with the science groups, so I was looking over a substantial part of NASA’s technology development in the mid-to-late ’90s. At that time, I went back to NASA Headquarters and became at the time the Assistant Associate Administrator for Advanced Human Spaceflight. So, we were looking at everything…

Host: That’s a long title.

Gary Martin: Yeah, it’s a long title, but it was really about everything going, for humans to go past the space station, all the advanced work that the human spaceflight program was doing — advanced suits and looking at — and we were leading, I was leading a study there. It was called the Decadal Planning Team.

So, we had about 70 people, really amazing people around the whole agency working on my team to put forth new technologies that we would first use for science but then use for human spaceflight in the long-term. So, I was very excited about humans going into space. That’s why I went to NASA.

One of those studies we did, though, was if you look at how hard it is to keep a long-term strategy, really a multi-generational strategy that has to cross many political transitions, how do you do that? Well, one of the studies came back and said — that I believe has a lot of substance to it — is that you have to create jobs and markets in space or on the Earth that are part of that, meaning that you have jobs. And this is a good positive feedback mechanism for a long-term strategy, because people see jobs starting and growing and markets, and these are long-term investments. That means the congressional people are interested in its success.

Host: Everybody, the economy, everybody.

Gary Martin: And you get this long-term, you actually see people on the moon and Mars in the future, and all kinds of things in space.

Host: And this isn’t that different from thinking of aviation, from the Wright Brothers to then the government actively working to build airplanes during World War I, or even the Post Office flying things around. Aviation was very heavily government-created and supported, and then started bringing in commercial things, which were still subsidized, but then eventually now, all of our aeronautics work is straight-up research and development helping that, but there’s a very strong and robust commercial. It’s not that different.

Gary Martin: It’s a perfect analogy, it really is. In fact, we often use it, especially with airmail. We were paying more for airmail, and a lot of times in the early days, that mail never made it to its destinations. However, those funds created better aircraft that had more carrying capability that someday started with passengers, as they got safer.

Host: Those same early days, that’s what we’re looking at now in the stuff you’re working on.

Gary Martin: Yeah. So, because of that, I went to the International Space University for a few years in France, and was director of the summer studies there for a few years. And when I came back to NASA, Ames was just starting on a new, exciting era of reaching out to commercial space, and reaching out to industry about partnering in a big way. And the center director at the time knew I was coming back from the ISU, and asked me if I would like to come out and lead that activity here.

And so, Ames is unique in many was, in that we set up a directorate just for partnerships, and resources were put into that area.

Host: Just to focus on building that community, and building those…

Gary Martin: And the whole center was stimulated to do partnerships. We actually, I think people don’t really remember, but — so, 2007 is when I came here — but before that, there was no structure at NASA Headquarters about how to handle partnerships. There were legal instruments called Space Act Agreements that people did on occasion, but we started making it into a major activity of the center, and we were out reaching out to Silicon Valley and all around the nation of people who might want to partner with us, for the reason that one thing is, they’re exposed to NASA facilities and technology, we’re exposed to their technology and innovation. It’s something that is good for the agency, and that we really…

Host: The feedback loop you kind of mentioned. Yeah, it’s like we learn from them, they learn from us, it all helps out.

Gary Martin: And so, that’s why I came, and I’ve been here since 2007. And that actually leads into some of the other parts of the office that I have. In fact, many of the centers come here to see what we do. And a lot of it has to do that we’re in Silicon Valley, and there’s entrepreneurism.

Host: Surrounded by academia, surrounded by companies big and small.

Gary Martin: This environment, yeah, this great environment of innovation and getting things started, and optimism. And it’s a part of the center I really appreciate. One of the other things that’s part of this, one of the things we were trying to do is make a very creative environment, a very innovative environment, and one way to do that is to have lots of ways to look at a problem, a difficult problem you haven’t seen before.

And so, we brought in a lot of international students, and we’ve started a program called NASA International Internship. That actually originated here, and we’re implementing. And in order to do that, one of the things, one of the pieces of my office is to do nontraditional — and I say nontraditional partnerships internationally, means that those are countries we haven’t typically done.

Host: Typically done a lot of work with? You’re creating the wheel.

Gary Martin: Bringing in students, and some of these have really been success stories.

Host: And in understanding the partnerships, the group you work with, you already mentioned a small business chunk and also an international partners…

Gary Martin: Right, we actually do all the licensing, and we do software licensing and releases. All this is available to small businesses or large businesses. We help you, we transfer our technology to businesses constantly through Space Acts or through licensing. We do all that in one group called the Technology Transfer group.

We write the reimbursable Space Acts, where you would pay us for expertise or use of our facilities, or the non-reimbursable, where we don’t exchange money, but we exchange information about what you’re doing and what we’re doing.

Host: Mutually beneficial?

Gary Martin: We have over 300 of these acts always active at one time. And then the third area is called, we call it the Space Portal, but it also has a program called the Emerging Space Office, where we do economic studies looking at what are the economics of space, and we work with the commercial space industry to look at how NASA can interface with this new burgeoning industry.

We’re at a really change point, inflection point in time. If you look at how much money is now being invested by private investors in commercial space, over $12 billion in the last 10 years. That’s substantial, and before that it was minimal.

Host: Space Portal is almost like a think tank within NASA to look at these, come up with concepts.

Gary Martin: It’s exactly that. It’s a very powerful think tank that has come up with amazing ideas that have changed NASA over the years. And very proud to work with them. In fact, I have known them for many years before I came here.

Host: OK, cool. If you’re running a startup or a company and you want to join one of these partnerships, where do they even start?

Gary Martin: Well, there’s a lot online.

Host: Online, I’m sure.

Gary Martin: Any of these, and we have Ames partnerships. If you do that, there’s lots of links to my organization. A lot of times, I might be on the front, or any of our leaders, our people — we go to many events and hand out cards and brochures. But it’s still hard to get everything out. Even people, I realize that people don’t even know about SBIR. And if you’re a small company…

Host: And SBIR, that’s the small business?

Gary Martin: That’s the Small Business Innovative Research grants. If you’re a small business, it is worth everyone’s time to take a look at the webpage about what we solicit after. And it’s a huge amount of subtopics that most likely many technical businesses could relate to.

Host: Excellent, and we’re throw up some of those websites on the links on the landing page on NASA.gov. So, we can add those in — the SBIR, the partnerships, even the Space Portal.

Gary Martin: That would be wonderful.

Host: So everybody can come back and look at that.

Gary Martin: That would be great.

Host: Thanks for coming around, Gary.

Gary Martin: Thanks, Matt.

[End]