The University of California, Berkeley, is teaming up with NASA‘s Ames Research Center and developer SKS Partners to create research space for companies interested in collaborating with UC Berkeley and NASA scientists and engineers to generate futuristic innovations in aviation, space exploration and how we live and work in space.

The Berkeley Space Center, announced today (Monday, Oct. 16), aims to accommodate up to 1.4 million square feet of research space on 36 acres of land at NASA Ames‘ Moffett Field in Mountain View, leased from NASA.

The new buildings, some of which could be ready for move-in as early as 2027, will house not only state-of-the-art research and development laboratories for companies and UC Berkeley researchers, but also classrooms for UC Berkeley students. These students will benefit from immersion in the Silicon Valley start-up culture and proximity to the nation‘s top aeronautical, space and AI scientists and engineers at Ames.

"We would like to create industry consortia to support research clusters focused around themes that are key to our objectives, in particular aviation of the future, resiliency in extreme environments, space bioprocess engineering, remote sensing and data science and computing," said Alexandre Bayen, a UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and associate provost for Moffett Field program development.

"We‘re hoping to create an ecosystem where Berkeley talent can collaborate with the private sector and co-locate their research and development teams,” he added. “And since we will be close to NASA talent and technology in the heart of Silicon Valley, we hope to leverage that to form future partnerships."

Ever since Naval Air Station Moffett Field was decommissioned in 1994 and NASA Ames acquired an additional 1,200 acres, NASA has been focused on developing those acres into a world-class research hub and start-up accelerator. Initiated in 2002, NASA Research Park now has some 25 companies on site, including Google‘s Bay View campus.

"We believe that the research and the capabilities of a major university like Berkeley could be a significant addition to the work being done at Ames," said NASA Ames Director Eugene Tu. "In a more specific way, we would like the potential of having proximity to more students at the undergraduate and graduate level. We would also like the possibility of developing potential partnerships with faculty in the future. The NASA mission is twofold: inspiring the next generation of explorers, and dissemination of our technologies and our research for public benefit. Collaboration between NASA and university researchers fits within that mission."

UC Berkeley hopes eventually to establish housing at Moffett Field to make working at the innovation center easier for students — without a 47-mile commute each way. Bayen noted that Carnegie Mellon University already occupies a teaching building at Moffett Field. With the addition of UC Berkeley and the proximity of Stanford University, he expects the intensity of academic activities in the area, both instructional and research, to increase immensely.

"We have major facilities here at Ames — the world‘s largest wind tunnel, NASA‘s only plasma wind tunnel to test entry systems and thermal protection systems, the agency‘s supercomputers — and the university will likely build facilities here that that we might leverage as well. So, I look at that as a triad of students, faculty and facilities," Tu added. "Then the fourth piece, which is equally important: If the project is approved to move forward, the university will likely bring in partners, will bring in industry, will bring in startups, will bring in incubators that could be relevant to NASA‘s interest in advancing aeronautics, science and space exploration."

"What they‘re doing at NASA Ames is transformational, but in order to make it heroic, in order to make it even larger than what is now possible, they have to use the combined resources of the number one public university in the world, private industry and the most innovative place on the planet, which is Silicon Valley," said Darek DeFreece, the project’s founder and executive director at UC Berkeley.