SAN FRANCISCO – The University of California, Berkeley, and the NASA Ames Research Center unveiled plans Oct. 16 for a $2 billion Berkeley Space Center in Mountain View, California.
The University of California-NASA Ames partnership, within the works for greater than 20 years, “has the potential to encourage not only the following generation of technologies and discoveries but the following generation of explorers, the scholars of today who can be the longer term engineers, scientists, technologists and business professionals in aviation science and space exploration,” NASA Ames Director Eugene Tu said during a news conference.
Academic and Industry Tenants
Pending an environmental impact review, initial construction could begin in roughly three years. The University of California is prone to claim roughly 10 percent of the 130,000-square-meters put aside for offices and research and development facilities.
“A really broad collection of private industry” is prone to lease remaining facilities, said Dan Kingsley, managing partner of SKS Partners, the industrial real estate developer working with UC Berkeley and NASA Ames on the project.
With 18 acres of outside space, the brand new Berkeley Space Center campus is designed to advertise collaboration amongst government, industry and academic tenants.
“A lot collaboration results from people bumping into each other,” said Carol Christ, UC Berkeley chancellor. “I’ve been struck by the intentionality of the design in regard to pathways and to people finding outdoor meeting spaces, bumping-into spaces that fuel scientific discovery and collaboration.”
Berkeley Space Center clusters will deal with space robotics, distant sensing, planetary sciences, climate change, electric aviation, mixed autonomy traffic operations and firefighting.
“Once we start assembling tenants on this recent Berkeley Space Center, they are going to have R&D teams which can be crucially focused around key disciplines that advance each of those applications, specifically machine learning and artificial intelligence, data science, advanced robotics, computing and lots of others,” said Alexandre Bayen, UC Berkeley associate provost for Moffett Field Program Development.
Workforce Development
The UC Berkeley-NASA partnership is also prone to help expand the aerospace workforce.
“We predict these recent opportunities that we’re providing for each undergraduates and graduate students will help produce the kinds of execs of the longer term that corporations are on the lookout for,” Christ said.
As well as, the Berkeley Space Center will offer opportunities for retraining staff. Aerospace engineers who accomplished degrees a few years ago, for instance, could also be wanting to enhance their knowledge of machine learning and artificial intelligence, data science, computing and space robotics.
“That is a possibility to return here to the Berkeley Space Center and be trained in these recent disciplines, disciplines which can be fundamental to the hunt of space innovation,” Bayen said.
NASA Ames leaders have envisioned this sort of research campus for a few years.
“Ever since NASA took over stewardship of Moffett Field after the Naval Air Station was closed within the mid-90s, now we have envisioned a serious academic campus to enhance the federal, industry and academic research complex we’re constructing right here in the center of Silicon Valley,” Tu said. “In some ways that is considered one of the ultimate major pieces of the puzzle that now we have been looking forward to.”