During the height of the space race in the 1960s, the Langley Research Center of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was soaring. The Apollo space program, in full swing, would soon land men on the moon. NASA-led advances in aerospace, some of them developed at Langley, were helping the jumbo jet revolutionize global air travel.

With so much going on, Langley officials wanted to push the frontier of aerospace research even further. They figured they could help their scientists by giving them access to advanced graduate education programs. So Langley approached several Virginia universities about establishing a special research facility in Hampton Roads. But the project ended up stillborn, killed by ceaseless squabbling among the schools. Instead, George Washington University in Washington, D.C., swooped in to create a substitute - the Joint Institute for Advanced Flight Sciences that remains part of Langley's research today.

More than 30 years later, a new question looms: Will history repeat itself? A plan is afoot to create a National Institute of Aerospace near Langley's sprawling, 80-year-old campus by the salt marshes of Virginia's Tidewater. The institute facility, which could open next year, would include a new $50 million research building that could make Virginia a center of myriad research for universities, large corporations and government agencies. Research would include acoustics for noise reduction, tiny but sturdy sensors for airplanes or heavy equipment, improved airborne and aerospace systems and materials and structures with better performance characteristics. Some big pluses: Langley already boasts of massive wind tunnels and hosts NASA's air safety research center.

Yet, Virginia universities are showing signs of the same infighting that doomed the previous institute.

The bickering is getting louder as NASA prepares to choose an academic consortium for the institute, perhaps by year-end. With seed money planned at $5 million for five years, the institute is quite a plum. It could provide the winning consortium with millions in licensing revenue. By aiming research and development at commercial applications, the institute could be financially self-sufficient within about six years, helping NASA with its budgets as space spending wanes. "We don't think the institute can reach its full potential if it has to rely solely on NASA Langley for funding," says Charles Harris, a NASA administrator.

The deck seems stacked against Virginia's academics. Evident is a historic lack of cooperation - some would say inveterate dislike -among them. Since Virginia does not have a chancellor to rule over all of its state-supported educational institutions, various school officials are free to pursue their own interests. The result: a Byzantine set-up marked by parochialism and feuding.

Two competing factions of Virginia universities have emerged to vie for the right to run the institute. The first includes Virginia Tech and the University of Virginia along with Georgia Tech, North Carolina State, the University of Maryland and North Carolina A&T. A second consortium includes Old Dominion University in Norfolk and Hampton University, along with California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech), Cornell, Illinois, Michigan, Princeton, Rensselear Polytechnic Institute and the University of Madison-Wisconsin. Another keystone of the ODU-HU bid is Battelle, a Columbus, Ohio-based nonprofit research organization whose scientists have helped develop technology for consumer products such as copy machines and compact discs.

Visions of lucrative royalties and licensing and marketing agreements are setting the competing schools up to knock each other off. ODU and Hampton University, for example, are still smarting after being dumped from the Virginia Tech-UVA consortium, an alliance that had been a year in the making. It's unclear what happened, but the sudden jettisoning of the two schools most closely located near Langley stoked smoldering bitterness and created sharp lines of division. "My view is that the bid from Langley will go to a university (consortium) outside of Virginia," says Terry Riley, executive director of the Hampton Roads Technology Council, "because Virginia schools have not been able to work together."

Still, there is hope the two sides may yet make amends. Taking the high road, the ODU-HU coalition already has agreed that should it win the bid it would welcome UVA and Virginia Tech into the fold. "We did that because we think it's important to the commonwealth" for the schools to pool their talents, says Dr. Bob Ash, acting director of research and graduate studies at ODU. The agreement is not reciprocal, however, meaning if the ODU-HU consortium's proposal is rejected and the Tech-UVA group wins, the two schools most closely associated with Langley could wind up as spectators, not participants, in the NIA.

If Virginia's academics want an example of how to work together, they need go no further than Ohio. The Ohio Aerospace Institute in Cleveland, a private nonprofit initiated by NASA's Glenn Research Center, has spawned numerous collaborations between private industry, academic institutions and federal agencies. Its research has led to improved technologies for brain surgery and systems for more efficient manufacturing without a lot of bickering.

The Ohio nonprofit was formed in the late 1980s, with NASA playing an instrumental role in encouraging and promoting it. However, NASA has never provided direct financial support. OAI's budget comes from member dues and R&D contracts that its teams win. Membership is composed of colleges and universities in Ohio, federal agencies and large corporations, including Caterpillar, Timken, Goodrich, McDermott, Rolls Royce, Honeywell and others. Although there is bound to be some competition among businesses, the strategic goal of OAI is to form collaborative teams that first examine markets, and then devise solutions. This cuts down on squabbling and helps OAI research teams spend more time generating useful products, says spokesman Don Bailey. "When we put these teams together, each one gets the right to choose how it will deal with intellectual property: who will get ownership, how to handle residuals, and so on. You've got to handle residuals up front. Otherwise, you'll have a catfight down the road."
One of its most successful collaborations involved The Cleveland Clinic, French communications company Marconi Corp., NASA, the U.S. Air Force and universities. The result: applying military targeting technology for surgeons to use during brain operations. So far, The Cleveland Clinic has used the technology in about 500 successful operations, helping reduce patient-recovery time to about three days, says Bailey.

A Langley-led institute could spawn similar success stories. Some think it could become a hub for critical R&D that addresses some of the nation's transportation woes. The U.S. interstate highway system is approaching "crisis dimensions" that could limit the U.S. economy, says Dr. Roy Harris, retired former assistant director of research at NASA Langley. He points out that Hampton Roads is home to Norfolk Southern Railway, military logistics installations, shipyards, a massive port complex and crisscrossed by a nexus of interstate highways. Langley's new institute should be used to devise new technologies for a variety of transportation modes. "We've got real talent in the field of transportation here. This could grow to be much larger than just the aviation piece."

By partnering with more well-established universities in their two separate proposals, the Virginia schools hope to deal with another thorny issue: the lack of R&D pedigree. Only one of Virginia's universities, Virginia Tech, is ranked among the top 50 schools in the nation in research funding from the National Science Foundation.
The HU-ODU bid appears to possess some natural advantages. Hampton University last year earned research contracts from Langley worth $4.5 million, the most of any Virginia school and third-most in the nation. It is also the only state institution offering a degree concentration in atmospheric sciences, one of several critical research areas that Langley has stressed must be part of the institute's mission. Likewise ODU, which earned the second-highest amount of Langley contracts among Virginia schools at $2.3 million, has run a full-scale wind tunnel for Langley research for years.

In fact, the ODU-Hampton initiative already is generating interest among private-sector companies. Battelle has identified a potential opportunity for the consortium to build a technology platform for distance-learning programs that would be used by Cisco Learning Institute, a nonprofit arm of Cisco Systems Inc. Battelle is pitching the proposal to Cisco and Minnesota-based Adayana, an e-learning company, in part based on ODU's track record of delivering 20,000 distance-learning courses a year. "Whether we get the NIA (contract) or not, these are the types of deals we need to learn how to do," says Ash.

If an out-of-state school wins the contract, there is no way to control how much of the research will occur in Hampton Roads, even with a campus situated near Langley, says Bob Sharack, director of special projects for Hampton Roads Partnership. It's possible that a non-Virginia university could win the bid and take core research back to its main campus. That's why Sharack and others are pulling for the Hampton Roads schools to get the nod. If that doesn't happen, they at least hope another Virginia university will be instrumental in the NIA, to keep economic development opportunities in the commonwealth. "Will we work with whomever gets it? Sure. But we will have certain natural advantages if a Hampton Roads consortium gets it," says Sharack.

It also remains to be seen what impact the NIA will have on existing Langley contracts with Hampton Roads schools. Sharack worries that the NIA may become too much of a good thing. Will Hampton and ODU continue to get multimillion-dollar contracts from Langley each year, or face the prospect of losing them to other schools in competitive biddings? "We're not sure yet," says Sharack. "NASA says no, but if the NIA is as competitive and successful as we'd all like it to be, I believe it would certainly have the ability to bid on this kind of work."
NASA is trying to allay those fears. Harris acknowledges that, as a national agency, Langley is charged with recruiting the "best and brightest" minds from around the country. Still, his rooting interest for the Virginia institutions is barely concealed. "I look at this institute and say, 'to reach its potential, it's desirable that regional assets are used to fulfill its mission,'" Harris says. "But we can't force partnerships; we have to let the competition play out."

Regardless of who wins the Langley contract, Riley of the technology council says Hampton Roads stands to benefit from the clustering of researchers and attendant economic activity. Within a few months, Virginia's schools should learn whether they are contenders or merely pretenders.

Return to Virginia Business - May 2002