NASA Aeronautics

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the focal point for the federal government's support of aeronautics technology, is responsible for preserving the United States' leadership role in aeronautical science and technology and for disseminating information resulting from its activities. These efforts are vital because the civil aeronautics industry, employing about 700,000 workers, plays a major role in commerce, transportation, and national security. In 1991 it provided a $29 billion boost to the U.S. trade balance. The industry is also known for fostering spin-offs of advanced technology products useful in other sectors of the U.S. economy. This report identifies NASA's technology transfer activities and assesses their impact on the industry's international competitiveness.

GAO found that NASA: (1) used a broad definition of technology transfer to include all activities associated with the management of its aeronautics program; (2) used eight primary activities to transfer research results to the aeronautics industry, of which contracts and cooperative agreements constituted a small percentage; (3) believed that contracts and cooperative agreements made the greatest contribution to the industry's competitiveness and enabled it to transfer technology as it was being developed; (4) had 255 research contracts and cooperative agreements with a total value of $105 million in fiscal year 1992; (5) spent only 26 percent of its $555-million aeronautics research and development budget on subsonic research, which was the most beneficial to the industry's near-term competitiveness; (6) requested greater funding for subsonic research, but the Office of Management and Budget cut the budget, believing that such funding would be an inappropriate federal subsidy to the aeronautics industry; (7) did not have a comprehensive system for monitoring and evaluating applications of its transferred technologies or data to objectively determine the results of its transfers; (8) relied on industry feedback to monitor effectiveness, but did not consolidate transfer data in a consistent format for analysis and program management; (9) conducted a customer survey in 1991 that revealed the industry's perception of and concerns about NASA transfer activities, but did not provide data to measure the impact of transfer activities; and (10) issued a December 1992 directive recommending that field centers improve their technology transfer activities, but the directive did not ensure that field centers would uniformly gather transfer data or include plans for analyzing resource allocation among various activities.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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