New Scientist reports here that NASA is very likely to shutdown its Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) in order to save US$4 million in budget cuts. The budget cuts are due to US Congress legislation to tighten NASA's overall budget, cost overruns on the space shuttle's replacement, and NASA chief Mike Griffin's prioritisation of space exploration over science research programs. This isn't a new trend: I wrote about it over 9 years ago for the late 21C Magazine on NASA's institutional problems that contributed to the Challenger fateful "launch decision" in 1986.
NIAC's focus on "advanced concepts" and a "10 to 40-year time frame" places it firmly in the territory of "blue sky" research that examines speculative ideas with high-return potential. It probably qualifies as an "Institute of Foresight" under Richard Slaughter's criteria. The cultural/memetic effects of even the graphic depictions of these "advanced concepts" should not be underestimated: the British Interplanetary Society spread some powerful memes in the late 1970s that resonated with the first Star Wars film trilogy.
To understand the deeper reasons for NIAC's closure it is helpful to understand the historical roots of NASA's research management system. These roots include include the Manhattan Project model for "Big Science" research, the emergence in the United States and Europe of institutes and think tanks, and the rise-and-fall of Keynesian economics from World War II to 1973. This period coincides with a a broader arc that technology historian Thomas P. Hughes shows in his book Rescuing Prometheus (Vintage Books, New York, 2000) of large-scale projects that occur in a climate defined by complexity, risk, uncertainty and multiple stakeholders. You can read the "overview" first chapter of Hughes' book here.
The "Big Science" institutes such as the Manhattan Project and NASA are now being challenged or "disrupted" by commercially funded programs. The research agenda of these programs has different aims than "blue sky" innovation and "pure" science even if it is couched in the same surface language. Rather, the emphasis is on research artifacts, prototypes and rich insights that can be fed into "next generation" product development and new services generation. The Ansari X Prize and the X Prize Foundation exemplify this heuristic-driven approach in new spacecraft development.
Perhaps if NASA had pursued an X Prize approach then it might not have had the budget overruns to its "next generation" Orion and Ares programs. NASA's Mike Griffin might then not have had to make cutbacks to NIAC and other divisions. This is a budgeting and resources allocation question that I will leave to the systems thinkers amongst us.
Interestingly, NIAC is part of the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) which interacts between research institutes and universities to ensure alignment and collaboration. Many of NIAC and USRA's activities focus on the socialisation and training of researchers in the space sciences and technology. These activities are vital for intergenerational knowledge, institutional memory and technology transfer. However, unless managers are using a system such as Kaplan and Norton's Balanced Scorecard which as an explicit "learning and growth" perspective, such activities may not be valued by traditional systems for management accounting.
Finally, NIAC's pending closure fits an institutional pattern that I've seen elsewhere with Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and AOL Research's closure. I hope to document this in the near-term future for the antipatterns crowd in software engineering . . .