NASA Research Park is a research park operated by NASA near San Jose, California which is developing a shared-use research and development campus in association with government entities, academia, industry and nonprofit organizations. NASA Research Park was approved by NASA in the fall of 2002 and has been active since then.
Ames Research Center
Congress established the Ames Research Center (Ames) in 1939 as the Ames Aeronautical Laboratory under the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). Ames has grown to occupy approximately at Moffett Field adjacent to the Naval Air Station Moffett Field in Santa Clara County, California, in the center of the region that would, in the 1990s, become known as Silicon Valley. In 1958, Congress created NASA with the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, 42 U.S.C. § 2451 et seq. At that time, the Ames Aeronautical Laboratory was renamed to the Ames Research Center and became a NASA field center.
From the 1940s through the 1990s, Ames scientists and engineers conducted flight research in many areas, including variable stability aircraft, guidance and control displays, boundary-layer control, vertical and short takeoff and landing aircraft, and rotorcraft. Ames developed the swept wing design and the conical camber, now considered in the creation of every supersonic airliner.
Ames developed and operated facilities, including flight simulators and wind tunnels, using computers and the arc jets facility to test materials at very high temperatures, critical to high-speed aircraft development and space vehicle re-entry. One of Ames's contribution to the early space program for human missions was solving the problem of getting astronauts safely back to Earth through the development of the blunt body design for re-entry vehicles.
Ames assisted in the development of Apollo, developed and operated the Pioneer Missions (the first spacecraft to travel through the asteroid belts to observe Jupiter and Saturn and Venus), and created the tiltrotor aircraft. The diversity of accomplishments led to the focus in the 1990s on Ames becoming the high-tech center of NASA. In those days, Ames became known as the Center of Excellence for Information Technologies, researching human-centered computing, a significant interdisciplinary effort to develop means of optimizing the performance of mixed human and computer systems. These new technologies were relevant for aeronautics and space operations, with ground-based operators, astronauts (or pilots/controllers in the air traffic management system) and robots functioning collaboratively to maximize mission science return, productivity and safety. This human-centered computing focus developed the expertise for Ames to become the lead for all supercomputing in NASA, and in 2005 Ames operated the world's second fastest supercomputer, partnered with S.G.I. and Intel.
In the 1990s, following its historical experience in life and space sciences, Ames developed a focused new program called Astrobiology to search for the origins of life in the universe. Ames led NASA's Kepler Mission, a spacecraft designed to find Earth-sized planets in other galaxies that may be in or near habitable zones. Ames also developed SOFIA, the new Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, using a Boeing 747 aircraft that studied the universe from 2010 to 2022 in the infrared spectrum.
Concurrent with innovations in science and technology, Ames has created partnerships with universities and industry, both onsite and in distance collaborations. The opportunity for this new partnering became available in the early 1990s, with the potential for R&D partners to move into the property obtained from the transfer of Navy Moffett Field land to NASA.
From its establishment in 1939, Ames shared the land, generally known as Moffett Field, with the United States Navy, jointly using the major airfield on the property. In the 1930s, the Navy developed Moffett Field originally for the home of the famous "Lighter than Air Era of American Military History," housing and operating large-scale airships. Through the years, several military organizations, including the United States Air Force, used the Moffett Field facilities, and in the late 1980s, the Navy operated the base.