Promoting Innovations And Patents For Exploring Our Final Frontier

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Whether you're NASA Administrator nominee Jared Isaacman, Virgin Galactic Founder Richard Branson, Artemis mission specialist Christina Koch, or even fictional astronaut and self-proclaimed "space pirate" Mark Watney, setting out on our final frontier and exploring space requires the right technology. The technology associated with space exploration has come a long way from the once-cutting-edge systems that put Sputnik into orbit and allowed the Apollo 11 crew to land on the lunar surface. A nearly exponential surge in patent activity related to space exploration, particularly over the past decade and a half, has captured a snapshot of these developments. Along with these technological advances, ambitions are growing too. There is a desire to go bigger, faster and further in space exploration.

But as the ambitions have grown, more and more obstacles have emerged. Space exploration poses unique research challenges: the need for more efficient rockets to travel farther into inhabitable areas of space, food production for space settlements and preventive and responsive medical research on the potential detrimental impact of long-term exposure to the conditions of space travel. In response to these research challenges, inventors from across the space exploration sector have created new and exciting innovations — innovations protected by patents. Hundreds of thousands of patents are issued each year in the United States across a range of industries and disciplines. Hidden in this haystack of patents, however, could very well be the needles needed to solve each of these challenges and allow us to, in the words of Neil deGrasse Tyson, "push the boundaries of our existence."

There is some tension, however, between the space industry and patent law, with the value of the latter not always being recognized. Patents, however, contribute directly to the development of space exploration innovations by providing a way for innovators to receive compensation for their contributions, even when the path to market for a new innovation may be long or prohibitively expensive for small inventors whose innovations compete with the likes of NASA, Space X and Blue Origin. Even those small inventors can generate revenue from their creations through licensing.

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