$24 Million for Thinking About Space

PASADENA – The W. M. Keck Foundation has granted Caltech $24 million to establish what appears to be the first privately-funded space science think tank, Caltech announced Tuesday.

The Keck Institute for Space Studies will bring together science and engineering brains from around the world to study of the frontiers of space research, said physicist Tom Prince, the new institute’s director.

It will break the mold of a traditional think tank in its second year, Prince said, evolving into a "think-and-do tank" that also funds development of technologies dreamed up by researchers at the institute.

The eight-year grant will support teams of approximately 20 researchers in intensive, months-long brainstorms of topics such as how to detect life on Mars and new methods of launching and propelling spacecraft.

Each year, a panel will choose new subjects to explore and new teams invite to Caltech to study them.

The involvement of the Keck Foundation, which funds research projects including Hawaii’s Keck Telescope, gives scientists "a lot of flexibility, a lot of freedom" to consider technologies that could be important for space science a decade or more down the road, said Charles Elachi, director of JPL.

Elachi called the combination of Caltech, JPL and a private foundation "almost a dream team."

"The Keck Institute stands be be a real service to the broader scientific and technological space community," said geophysicist Maria Zuber,of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by E-mail.

"In the current environment of federal funding the tendency is to favor well-posed problems… \ut some of the most intriguing problems in space science aren’t so well posed," she said. "The Institute will provide the opportunity to ponder such questions with rigor and to hopefully chart a meaningful path forward for at least some of them."