The University of California, Berkeley, and NASA’s Ames Research Center just announced plans to construct a colossal $2 billion space center in Silicon Valley.
The collaboration between the University of California and NASA Ames, called the Berkeley Space Center, has been within the works for greater than twenty years. It is going to be a training ground for the subsequent generation of space professionals, from engineers and explorers to business leaders within the burgeoning private space industry, team members said.
“The NASA mission is twofold: inspiring the subsequent generation of explorers, and dissemination of our technologies and our research for public profit,” NASA Ames Director Eugene Tu said in a UC Berkeley statement. “Collaboration between NASA and university researchers suits inside that mission.”
Construction could begin as soon as 2026, pending the successful completion of an environmental review. The University of California intends to occupy near 10% of the brand new center’s estimated 1.4 million square feet (130,000 square meters) of office space and R&D facilities.
Dan Kingsley of SKS Partners, the industrial real estate developer collaborating on the project, said that “a really broad collection of private industry” is poised to lease the remainder of the facilities, in response to Space News.
The hope is that the Berkeley Space Center will change into an epicenter for advancements in diverse fields, starting from space robotics and planetary science to automated aviation.
“We’re hoping to create an ecosystem where Berkeley talent can collaborate with the private sector and co-locate their research and development teams,” Alexandre Bayen, a UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and associate provost for Moffett Field Program Development, said in the identical statement.
“And since we can be near NASA talent and technology in the center of Silicon Valley, we hope to leverage that to form future partnerships,” Bayen added.
Along with fostering research, this UC Berkeley-NASA collaboration goals to grow the aerospace workforce more broadly, in addition to deepen collaboration between academia and NASA.
“We imagine that the research and the capabilities of a significant university like Berkeley could possibly be a big addition to the work being done at Ames,” Tu said. “In a more specific way, we would really like the potential of getting proximity to more students on the undergraduate and graduate level. We’d also like the potential of developing potential partnerships with faculty in the long run.”
The Berkeley Space Center can even provide opportunities for current industry professionals to enhance their skills on latest technologies that they won’t have been trained on, like machine learning and data science.
“We would really like to create industry consortia to support research clusters focused around themes which are key to our objectives, particularly aviation of the long run, resiliency in extreme environments, space bioprocess engineering, distant sensing and data science and computing,” Bayen said.