UC Berkeley plans $2B space research center
UC Berkeley revealed Monday that it will build a $2 billion space research center on NASA property in Mountain View with astronomical expectations: thousands of new science jobs, a million square feet of office space for private partners, and acres of classrooms and laboratories aimed at breaking through boundaries on the Earth and beyond.
The Berkeley Space Center at NASA Research Park will sit on 36 acres at historic Moffett Field, about 7 miles east of Palo Alto. If environmental approvals work out over the next two years, the innovation hub could begin welcoming tenants by 2027, the university said at a press conference featuring UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ, NASA Ames Research Center Director Eugene Tu, and Nobel Laureate Saul Perlmutter, whose work led to the understanding that the universe is expanding at an increasing rate.
“This is an extraordinary day for UC Berkeley, for our academic mission and the public,” said Christ, noting that students will eventually spend a semester at the Berkeley Space Center similar to how they spend a half year studying abroad.
The Space Center is expected to generate about $40 million per year for the university from real estate income, research funding and other sources. The university expects to spend about $750,000 per year on faculty, staff and students working there, and has contributed about $1 million so far.
The South Bay center would cement California’s primacy in space technology and add a significant Bay Area complement — and rival — to established locations such as the Johnson Space Center in Texas and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
“California’s innovation and drive is not limited to Earth,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said, weighing in.
Tu said that by taking advantage of NASA’s wind tunnels, thermal testing environments, flight simulators and existing labs, the collaboration “has the potential to inspire not only the next generation of discoveries, but the next generation of explorers.”
San Francisco developer SKS Partners has been tapped to build the Berkeley Space Center, which cofounder Dan Kingsley said will set new standards for minimizing carbon impact. Expected to cover about the same square footage as San Francisco’s Salesforce Tower and include student and faculty housing and 18 acres of open space, the innovation hub will give breathing room to the cramped East Bay university that has been thwarted by lawsuits as it has tried to expand in its own neighborhood.
UC Berkeley already places third in the world — behind CalTech and Harvard University — on the list of best universities for space science, according to a 2022 ranking by U.S. News & World Report.
The top-rated program, Pasadena-based California Institute of Technology, known as CalTech — is home to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is NASA’s only federally funded research and development center. It’s managed and run by CalTech.
UC Berkeley hopes the new Space Center will let it boldly go where no university has gone before, partnering with industry to develop “aviation of the future” — such as autonomous helicopters and urban “vertiports” for them to land in — said Alexandre Bayen, associate provost in charge of the Berkeley Space Center project and a professor of electrical engineering and computer science.
“This is the decade of electric automated urban aviation, and this campus should be a pioneer of it,” Bayen said, adding that being so close to NASA talent and technology in Silicon Valley will make partnerships easier. He said it can also be a place to retrain scientists — like him — who never had formal training in artificial intelligence and other evolving technologies.
Asked how the Space Center might apply such technologies in space, Tu said one idea is to develop systems that enable missions “to be sustained on the moon and on Mars.” Students are also jazzed. “Seeing all of these scientists and engineers working on issues at the forefront of aerospace and tackling these huge issues and questions can serve as a huge inspiration to students,” Hannah Nabavi, an engineering physics major who heads a campus club called SpaceForm, said in a statement.
NASA’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, established the Ames Aeronautical Laboratory at Moffett Field in 1939. It was home to test flights for cutting-edge aeronautics technology during World War II and home to elements of the Army Air Corps and U.S. Navy.
After the Naval Air Station at Moffett Field was decommissioned in 1994, NASA Ames acquired an additional 1,200 acres of bayside land. Moffett’s hangar No. 1 is among the largest freestanding structures in the world. Originally built to house military dirigibles, the massive structure was found to have high levels of toxic chemicals on its exterior in the 1990s, with cleanup and restoration efforts ongoing.
In 2002, the adjacent NASA Research Park emerged and now has about 25 companies on the site, including Google’s Bay View campus.
The arrangement is reminiscent of other partnerships between government agencies and universities that contributed to the founding of modern Silicon Valley.
The nonprofit today known as SRI International got its start after World War II as the Stanford Research Institute. Housed on that university’s campus, it produced technological innovations supercharged by government cash infusions.
The organization’s growing closeness with the defense industry during the Vietnam War sparked campus protests, and SRI eventually broke off as a stand-alone agency affiliated with Stanford that introduced the rudiments of the personal computer in 1968, and went on to produce the Siri chatbot and numerous other inventions.
Separate from Monday’s announcement, UC Berkeley has also received grant money from NASA in the past for space biomanufacturing projects through its Center for Utilization of Biological Engineering in Space, or CUBES, project, which is researching manufacturing foods, fuels and medicine on future missions to Mars or in deep space.
The university and the space agency also entered into an agreement last year aimed at identifying “mutually beneficial learning opportunities in aerospace research” and building out the relatively new aerospace engineering major at UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering, according to NASA.
UC officials said they have been talking with NASA for more than 15 years about becoming an “academic partner,” said Darek DeFreece, the project’s founder and executive director at UC Berkeley. Carnegie Mellon University already has a few teaching buildings there, for example.
Things began to gel for UC Berkeley in 2018, and DeFreece went down to have a look.
Although the development of the Berkeley Space Center — a mere 7 miles from Stanford University — might seem ripe to become a science fan’s version of the Big Game rivalry between the two research giants, DeFreece thinks of it more as an opportunity for collaboration.
“While we are rivals on the field,” he said, “we are quite good partners in research.”